Audition (7 page)

You may think it odd that I am writing so much about my father and the Latin Quarter when this is
my
memoir, but that nightclub controlled our lives. Everything we did revolved around it. Everything we owned, every meal we ate, the shirts on our backs, so to speak, stemmed from the Latin Quarter. The Walters and the Latin Quarter were inseparable. The rest of the family, too, gravitated toward Palm Island. Aunt Lena often came to visit us. Uncle Max, my mother’s brother, was already working for my father so he was there, too. So, for six months, was another of her brothers, Uncle Dan Seletsky. He had had an operation just before the Latin Quarter’s second season, and my father not only gave him an apartment on the property to recuperate in, but gave his wife, Aunt Ann, a job: She became my father’s office manager.

The success of the Palm Island Latin Quarter continued to grow, and with it my father’s reputation as a brilliant showman. He became such a darling of the local papers that nationally syndicated columnists started mentioning the Latin Quarter in their columns. One such all-important columnist and radio broadcaster was Walter Winchell, who practically invented the gossip column. The more my father appeared in print, the greater his reputation grew. The combination of the two led to a new offer.

The way my father tells the story in his memoir, he was sitting alone in the Palm Island Latin Quarter on New Year’s Day 1941, when a press agent named Irving Zussman approached him. “How’d you like to run a nightclub on Broadway? In Times Square. The best location in the world. And you won’t have to put up a cent.” The space was available for a ten-year lease, Zussman told him. And there was a backer who wanted to get into the nightclub business, a millionaire named E. M. Loew, who owned a circuit of movie houses. My father had known Loew for twenty-five years. (He had booked vaudeville acts into some of Loew’s theaters.) Loew would put up all the money; my father would produce the shows. They would be partners.

My mother was skeptical—another risk. Why not let well enough alone? But my father’s eyes were dancing. He had seen the building which had been a fancy Chinese restaurant called the Palais d’Or, then the post-Harlem Cotton Club, then the Gay White Way. None of those nightclubs succeeded, but it could seat between six and seven hundred people, and my optimistic father felt he had the magic touch. So, without further thought, my father made a deal with the tightfisted E. M. Loew, whom he would later deem “as fine a gentleman as ever hated to pay a bill.”

So, for better or worse, we were on the move again. It was time to audition in a new city, at a new school, for new friends. This time we were off to New York.

New York, New York

I
THINK THE PROBLEM
was my “Cuban heels.” My entrée into New York did not go well as I started the eighth grade at Fieldston, my third school in as many years. Cuban heels had nothing to do with Havana or Miami. Mine were open-toed shoes with one-inch-high square heels that were the rage for young girls and were meant to be worn on dress-up evenings, with silk stockings with seams down the back. The shoes were usually brown or black. During the day one wore either brown loafers or laced-up saddle shoes. Saddle shoes were white with brown sides and with them, you wore ankle socks.

Now, this digression about footwear is to tell you that I had the whole deal messed up. I guess I had heard about the Cuban heels, but coming from Miami, my mother and I bought the shoes in white. The Miami stores didn’t carry them in black. To make matters worse, I wore the open-toed shoes not with the prescribed silk stockings but with white ankle socks. So I arrived that first day particularly dressed up, not knowing a soul in the school and looking like some hick, which of course I was. I also, in those days, had a strong Boston accent. It was long before the Kennedys made the accent fashionable, and to the New Yorkers I sounded affected saying “cahn’t” and “auhnt” instead of “can’t” and “aunt.”

Fieldston was then, and is now, a highly respected and difficult-to-get-into private school. I am amazed that my mother even knew about it and sent in an application. The main school is located in Riverdale, on the outskirts of the city. It also has an elementary school in Manhattan, and most of the kids had been going to the school since kindergarten or first grade. It was coed and full of cliques. This girl was best friends with that girl. This was the girl all the boys liked. This was the A group. This group didn’t matter. I was most definitely in the latter group.

In the beginning the toughest part of the day was lunch in the school cafeteria. I would take my tray and slowly walk around the room hoping that one of the A group would look up and ask me to sit down. Whomever you sat with for lunch defined your social standing. But even after I dumped the white Cuban heels for saddle shoes, I never really made the A group. I was more or less a B or C-plus. But we social underlings could occasionally ask one of the A girls for a “date” on a Saturday afternoon. We actually made dates, real dates. You would ask a girl if she wanted to spend Saturday with you, and then, if she said yes, you would have lunch and usually go to the movies. In those days, New York had dozens of movie theaters all around Broadway with great big stage shows. Broadway was very safe. And there were so many other places a teenager could go.

There was Radio City Music Hall, with its famed chorus line of high-kicking Rockettes. There were all the theaters hosting the big bands: Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman. Singing with Dorsey’s band was a skinny, hollow-cheeked, bow-tied fellow named Frank Sinatra, who looked as if a strong wind would blow him away, but he sang love songs like no one else and the young girls went wild. Sinatra’s adolescent fans, including me, were dubbed “bobby-sockers,” from obviously our short socks. When Sinatra appeared solo at the Paramount Theater in 1942, my mother, Jackie, and I stood in line to get tickets to see him. His appearance created such hysteria among young girls, including fits of swooning, that newspapers turned to psychiatrists for explanations. I didn’t swoon, but I loved his voice then and always.

Two years later his return to the Paramount caused what became known as the “Columbus Day Riot.” On his opening day in October 1944, ten thousand bobby-sockers, jammed the ticket line and an estimated twenty thousand others piled into Times Square, breaking windows in the crush. Sinatra burst into the nation’s awareness in a way that would not be matched until the arrival of Elvis Presley in the fifties and then the Beatles in the sixties. By the way, several years later, when Sinatra had lost his popularity and before his legendary comeback, he played the Latin Quarter.

But the point of all this is that a person, young or old, could go to a movie and watch the stage show and spend the whole day being entertained. And what a treat if you were going with one of the popular girls. To this day I remember the sort of adoring court that formed around those girls. One A-group member was tiny and graceful with little hands and feet. Another, the class beauty, had long, blond hair to her waist and a perfect pompadour—the look back then—hair swept high off the face in a big roll. The really older boys—the fifteen-year-olds—thought she was divine. Years and years later I met her again. She didn’t look as great, and I was already on the
Today
show. Okay, so I’m bragging, but after all those years of pushing so hard, I’m entitled.

It isn’t that I was a dog in those days, but I saw myself as too thin, and my pompadour never looked quite right. Slowly, though, I did make good friends and the B-list had some good kids. Also, slowly, I began to like my life in New York.

My family started off living in a residential hotel called the Buckingham, located at Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue (since renamed the Avenue of the Americas, although I’ve never heard a New Yorker refer to it that way). It was in the heart of the city, one block from one of my favorite places, the Automat. The legendary brainchild of Horn & Hardart, the Automat had branches all over New York and was like a big cafeteria, only a lot of the food—the sandwiches, the salads, the pieces of pie—were behind little glass doors. You put your nickels into a slot and the door opened to present you with the dish of your choice. The Automat had a memorable slogan—Less Work for Mother—and was not only great fun but a brilliant forerunner of today’s fast-food chains.

Some of the Automat’s patrons stayed all day, especially those with little money. They would eat the free saltines and ketchup that were on the tables, get a tea bag and some hot water, and hang around for hours. After a while we recognized these regulars. We would smile at them, and they would smile at us. The Automat was such a part of the New York scene that when Horn & Hardart finally closed its doors (the last one, on Forty-second Street and Third Avenue, closed in 1991) editorials were written and the old-timers actually grieved.

My problem, as ever, was Jackie. First of all Jackie and I had to share a bedroom, but a larger problem was that she had nothing to do. During the week I went to school, and whatever my mother did or wherever my mother went, Jackie went, too. By now she was a teenager. My mother, her heart aching at the loneliness of my sister, would often look at me pleadingly when I had one of my coveted Saturday afternoon “dates” and ask me to take Jackie along. I can still hear my mother’s voice: “Can’t you take your sister? It would mean so much to her.” My mother probably shouldn’t have done it, but she loved both of her daughters and one of them was so alone.

Me, I was just ashamed. Intolerant and ashamed. When Jackie stuttered, trying to get a word out, or didn’t seem able to join in the conversation, my friends would look uncomfortable. “What school does she go to?” they would question me. The next day they would ask me, shyly, if Jackie could dress herself. What did it mean to be “slow” or “retarded”? Did that mean she was crazy?

Today it’s hard to understand how much ignorance there was, but subjects like this were not discussed. If you had a child like my sister, you did what my parents did: protect her and hope no one would notice.

It must have been so difficult for my sister. She would have great spells of crying, tantrums of frustration, and, especially in later years, scream at my mother, but she never turned her anger on me.

I can’t say the same for myself. I could be short or angry with her, and to this day I regret every harsh word I said to her. Why
didn’t
I take my sister to the movies on a Saturday afternoon? There I was, her younger sister, with everything. And there was Jackie—with so little. The phone rang for me, but never for her. Friends came to see me, but not her. I even got her clothes. As Jackie and I grew older, she grew plumper, and if the new clothes my mother bought for her didn’t fit, I got them. Why didn’t she hate me? I don’t know. But she never did.

If conditions at home were difficult, conditions on Broadway and Forty-eighth street were not. The New York Latin Quarter opened on April 22, 1942, four months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and we entered World War II. The government started rationing gas, and we were issued ration cards for food. We even had blackout nights when we pulled down our shades and turned down the lights in case an enemy plane flew over the city. That would seem to have been an inauspicious time to launch a nightclub, but the reality was quite the opposite. The opulent fantasy world my father had created—red-velvet-lined walls, a thickly quilted pink ceiling, fountains spouting colored water, mirrors on the staircase, and indirect lighting seeping through ostrich feathers—turned out to be the perfect antidote to the harsh, wartime world outside the club’s mauve double doors. In its first year, the standing-room-only club grossed $1.6 million, a huge number in those days.

The
Saturday Evening Post
noted the phenomenon a year after the Latin Quarter opened: “It became one of the most amazing operations in Broadway history and no one could figure out how Walters had done it.” My father knew, of course. And he didn’t hesitate to share his formula in one magazine article after another.

“Everything in a nightclub should be a little bit better than you can afford,” he said, describing the club’s opulent decor. As for the customers: “Fill them full of food and take their breath away. Don’t let them relax and feel normal for a minute. The man who goes to a nightclub goes in the spirit of splurging, and you’ve got to splurge right along with him.”

What made the Latin Quarter’s success a true phenomenon was its success in the face of great competition. In this pre-TV era of nightclubs, the Latin Quarter was just one of many famous clubs in New York. There was, first and foremost, the Copacabana, owned, it was said, by the Mob. (The Mafia had nothing to do with the Latin Quarter. The Mob was very active in Las Vegas, but my father, remember, had come from Boston and started as a small-time booking agent. Their paths had not crossed. He had no dealings with these men and barely knew them when he opened his nightclubs. I used to joke, sometimes, that I wish he
had
known them because we would have been a lot richer.) The Copa was in the basement of a hotel just off Fifth Avenue and always hazy from cigarette smoke. But it had the most beautiful line of girls, the celebrated “Copa girls.” They could barely dance, but they didn’t have to. They just smiled and walked slowly and looked gorgeous. The Copa would later be the nightclub where a hilarious young comedy team, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, played season after season to packed houses.

Then there was the ever-so-chic Stork Club—no dancing girls, but nearly impossible to get into. The much-feared gossip columnist who had first noticed and written about my father, Walter Winchell, had his own table there every night. There was also the exclusive, high-society El Morocco, with its signature zebra-patterned banquettes and its powerful maître d’ who kept customers waiting for hours behind a velvet rope while he let in celebrities like Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart. El Morocco had dancing but no show; the famous patrons were the show. Billy Rose’s famous Diamond Horseshoe was my father’s main competition because it, too, had a big show and chorus girls.