Audition (8 page)

What set the Latin Quarter apart was the modest price—a two-dollar minimum and an average dinner tab of eight dollars a person, which could include shrimp cocktail, salad, steak, and dessert. And while most of the other clubs were definitely for adults only, the New York Latin Quarter (unlike the Palm Island Latin Quarter) welcomed families. It became the club of choice for high school seniors after their proms and for their grandmothers’ birthdays. Servicemen on leave, many of whom over the years have sent me their old Latin Quarter photos, also flocked to the club. My father didn’t charge them.

The Latin Quarter was such an important fixture in the cultural history of New York that more than sixty years later, Mayor Michael Bloomberg—after a vote by the city council—changed the name of Forty-eighth Street and Broadway, where the Latin Quarter reigned for two decades, to “Lou Walters Way.” I went to the unveiling ceremony, presided over by the mayor, on a beautiful spring morning in April 2006.

When my father died, we never had a memorial. In a way this was it. I found out who among my father’s chorus girls was still alive (they were in their seventies and eighties) and I invited them. Twelve of them came, including the still beautiful movie actress Arlene Dahl (who had been in the chorus when she was eighteen), and the irrepressible former cancan dancers, the identical twins Twinnie and Winnie, now octogenarians, who stood on either side of the mayor and, in front of the photographers, kicked a leg straight up over their heads, revealing their lacy underwear. The mayor turned red and burst out laughing, as did we all on that happy occasion. Two of the showgirls wore their old costumes, at least parts of them, and showed up in their headdresses and feather boas. They brought treasures, like old photographs of themselves as much younger showgirls at the Latin Quarter, and had many fond memories of my father. I took them to lunch after the ceremony, and one after another told me that my father was the kindest and gentlest of bosses. They adored him, which is why, even now, six decades and counting after the Latin Quarter closed, the chorus girls still have annual reunions and reminisce about what they describe as the best years of their lives. When I can, I join them.

When I was a kid, however, I didn’t feel the pride for my father that I would later with Mayor Bloomberg. The Latin Quarter may have been a special treat for everybody and his uncle, but not for me. I was old enough to recognize how other families lived, and they were not like mine. The fathers came home every night to have dinner with the stay-at-home mothers and the children. Cousins, aunts, and uncles gathered in their dining rooms for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Other kids had birthday parties at home and invited all their friends. We did none of that. We celebrated every Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all our birthdays at the Latin Quarter. My father coming home for dinner once a week, on Fridays, was almost the only time I saw him. Other nights he came home long after I was asleep and he himself slept late into the morning.

My father, I realize now, did try to include us in his life. Although the featured acts might change every two weeks, the big, elaborate productions usually changed just twice a year. When that happened my mother, Jackie, and I went with him on opening night. We sat at his table nearest the door, and he would spend most of the show talking over an intercom on the table to the lighting technicians or to Madame Kamerova, his longtime production director and choreographer. For the most part I just sat there quietly, and only roused myself, with my mother, to critique each new show. We usually forgot to tell my father how great it was and, God knows, I myself know today how much one wants to hear praise after a performance. Instead, more often than not, we told him only what was wrong.

On some level I guess I was punishing him for not being the father-next-door. I even refused to pay much attention to the influential Broadway columnists who stopped by our table—Ed Sullivan, Leonard Lyons, Earl Wilson, Louis Sobol, sometimes even Walter Winchell. My silence must have hurt my father, who, in turn, hurt me. “Your problem is that you have an inferiority complex,” he told me on one of those evenings. “That’s why you never want to talk to anybody.”

Jackie, on the other hand, loved the Latin Quarter. It became her home away from home, and she would spend whatever time she was allowed to backstage with the chorus girls. They were wonderfully kind to her as, in years to come, were many of the big stars my father hired, particularly Frank Sinatra, Carol Channing, and the singer Johnnie Ray. Johnnie Ray was famous for his song “The Little White Cloud That Cried,” and Jackie developed a serious crush on him. He, in turn, reciprocated by calling her “Jackie darling” and sending her birthday cards and autographed pictures from wherever he was on tour.

Perhaps it was because he, too, had a childhood disability—he was partially deaf and wore a hearing aid. Jackie felt that Johnnie Ray was as in love with her as she was with him. Years after her death I read her diary. Jackie could write, not well, but certainly legibly. The diary was laced with references to him, such as: “Johnnie is working in Chicago. Hope he calls me.” “Johnnie is in Dallas. Someday I will marry him.” So touching was that diary that I could barely look through it. Even today reading it for this book brought me to tears.

When Jackie wasn’t at the Latin Quarter, she was at the movies with my mother. Any movie. Night after night. Just the two of them. The empty days and nights must have seemed endless to both of them. Around this time my parents tried hiring companions for Jackie, but they disagreed about what kind of companion to hire. My father wanted someone more like Jackie, perhaps a bit slow herself. My mother wanted someone who would be more responsible and teach Jackie to read or write better. Neither type worked out.

If the companion was bright, as several were, the “friend-for-hire” had nothing in common with Jackie, leaving my sister just as isolated. But the few borderline companions were also failures. They were apt to forget about Jackie for their own pleasures. I remember one time Jackie and a companion went to the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. They skated around a bit and then the companion picked up some guy skating alone and left Jackie for hours on her own. When Jackie finally came home, she told my parents, and that was that. So, after a while, my parents gave up this experiment and again kept Jackie to themselves. Only once do I remember my parents ever having a holiday without her. They left Jackie with a chorus girl named Baby Lake, an adorable person whom we all liked, and went off to the Bahamas. But my parents telephoned home three times a day.

All this naturally put a great strain on their marriage. In Florida the close proximity of the Palm Island Club to our pistachio house afforded them time to be together, but that was not the case in New York.

After our first few months at the Buckingham, we moved into a magnificent penthouse on Central Park West. We would live in a series of penthouses over the years, but my mother rarely saw my father. He spent his nights at the Latin Quarter, his mornings asleep in the apartment, and his afternoons playing cards at the Friars Club, the renowned hangout for men in show business.

Money became an issue again between my parents. For all that the New York Latin Quarter was a runaway success, the productions were very expensive—each cost $75,000 to $80,000, a huge amount in those days—and the profit margin slim. My father was very generous—he never put my mother on an allowance as some husbands did—but she was always afraid that something would happen to the club or that my father would lose too heavily at cards, and they’d wind up broke again.

This fear was communicated to me from an early age. I became consumed with the same worry. What would we do when the money ran out? I can remember my parents arguing about putting some money into savings, about buying insurance, about making secure investments. My father’s response? He went off and produced a series of very expensive musical revues on Broadway. He wanted to be an even bigger success.

His first Broadway extravaganza at the Winter Garden Theater was the
Ziegfeld Follies of 1943
, a revival of the hugely successful musical revues that the great showman Florenz Ziegfeld had produced annually from 1907 to 1931. My father’s version was very similar to the show at the Latin Quarter, except even more extravagant. I went with my parents on opening night, and the next morning we held our breath, hoping the reviews would be good. They weren’t, but the wartime audiences loved it and kept it running for an impressive 523 performances.

That experience convinced my father to go after more projects on the Great White Way. In short order he wrote, produced, and directed
Artists and Models
, an updated vaudeville revue from the 1920s. The show opened at the Broadway Theater on November 5, 1943, and starred a then-famous singer named Jane Froman, who had lost the use of her legs in a plane accident. She was wheeled onto the stage in a specially built wheelchair.
Artists and Models
also starred a young comedian named Jackie Gleason. But despite the best efforts of its stars, and a very funny Gleason, it closed three weeks later. My father lost a lot of money, but that didn’t deter him. Less than three months later he revived and produced another early revue,
Take a Bow.
Even its star, Chico Marx of the famed Marx Brothers, couldn’t save it. The show closed after fourteen performances. Thousands more dollars of my father’s money were lost.

So here is how we were: my father, a gambler and a dreamer. My mother, a realist whom my father considered a pessimist. Me? I was a worrier whom both parents considered to be too serious for a very young girl.

It all came to a head one afternoon when I returned from school to find my mother in tears. “Daddy has left us,” she told me. “You go talk to him. Tell him to come back.” Being their go-between was not an unfamiliar role for me. My mother often used me to convey whatever grievance she had. “You talk to Daddy,” she would say, and I would try to get to him on those Friday nights when he was home. Most often everything turned out all right, but this seemed far more serious than usual. My mother asked me to take my sister, perhaps to create more sympathy. So I took Jackie’s hand and off we went to the Latin Quarter.

I remember very clearly sitting with my father at his table in that darkened, empty nightclub, crying and begging him not to leave us. Jackie, too, was crying, although she was not completely sure what was going on. I learned many years later that my father was said to be having an affair with one of his showgirls. If true, I certainly can’t judge him too harshly. Let’s face it, it would have made sense. Most people in show business were, and are, romantically involved with other people in show business. My father was surrounded by the most beautiful young women, and he was married to an ordinary, middle-aged woman. For her part my mother would probably have been happier married to a man who worked in the dress business, who brought home a paycheck every week and lived a stable life. But we didn’t know anything about a showgirl then.

My father didn’t say anything during my plea. He kissed Jackie and me and simply said he had to go back to work. I didn’t know what to do. I definitely didn’t know what to tell my mother. So I took Jackie to a movie with a stage show playing nearby. I dreaded returning home, and we sat in the theater for hours. But when we did go home, my mother was smiling. She told me my father had changed his mind and decided not to leave. My anguish was over.

I didn’t understand then what had made the difference, but I do today. For all his gambling and extravagance, my father was a principled and decent man. He also loved his introverted, shy younger daughter and his touching and sweet older daughter. How could he just walk out and leave us? It is also possible that in his own way he loved his wife. He certainly respected her. The crisis passed.

I
FINISHED THAT FIRST YEAR
at Fieldston in pretty good shape. I got As and Bs in most of my subjects, but I was lousy at gym. I envied the girls with their hockey sticks running across the field madly chasing after the ball. They were a breed apart. (I always thought, not especially kindly, of this particular kind of girl, confident and athletic, as a “hockey player.”) I wished then that I, too, were an athlete. It would have given me some sort of positive identity as a newcomer to the school. But there it was and is. I have never been good at any sport, be it basketball, volleyball, soccer, you name it. I never learned to play tennis. I was bored when I tried golf. I won’t drown in the water, but don’t ask me to do a backflip into the pool.

That lack of athletic expertise followed me to sleepaway camp. The summer of my first year in New York, I went off to the Poconos with my New Jersey cousin, Helen. She was a terrific girl and I liked her a lot. So, obviously, did everyone else. At the end of the six weeks we were away, Helen was voted not only “Best Athlete” but “Best All-Around Camper.” This was the kind of camp that felt every child should go home with some award to show her parents. Therefore, I was voted “Most Improved Athlete.” Need I say more?

Although I did well at Fieldston, the school, it turned out, was having a problem with me. It had to do with my father’s shows. Every time a new show opened at the Latin Quarter or on Broadway, my mother, Jackie, and I attended. Often after the show we would go with my father to Lindy’s, a famous late-night delicatessen. All the show folks in town seemed to end up there, especially the comedians. They all knew my father and made a fuss over Jackie and me. This meant that we got home very late and my mother then would keep me home the next day so I could sleep. Even though I was a good student, the school disapproved of the days I missed. They told my parents that if I wanted to return to Fieldston the next year, I would not be allowed to skip so much school. As it happened it wasn’t something we had to consider.

At the end of the school year, my father told us we would again be pulling up stakes and leaving what I’d come to think of as home. I was furious. I had finally made friends. I had a life. Once again I was having to leave it all behind. As the song goes, “Another opening of another show.” For me another audition. For my father a new challenge. The Latin Quarter was doing so well in New York that it didn’t need his constant attention, and he had another project in mind. Would you believe it? We were going back to Miami Beach.