In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (42 page)

In answer to his father’s query “What do you really do up there?” Danny once answered: “I’m helping the manager prevent the bored guests from moving out on rainy days.”

“How do you do that?” his father wanted to know.

“It ain’t easy,” he explained. “We play games, amuse the paying guests by falling into the swimming pool fully clothed, straw hat and all. When the going gets rough, Fishel and I chase each other through the halls with meat cleavers and make a final graceful lunge into the fishpond.”

Although it was hardly a training ground for a future movie star, Danny has the Catskills to thank for everything. He segued from stooging in theatres to playing in Abe Lyman’s orchestra; from traveling to Japan, China, Siam and points east as a dancer in 1934 to begging two-week bookings in third-rate Greenwich Village night clubs. But David Daniel Kaminsky’s name and luck changed only when he met Max Liebman, a former resort bookkeeper then in charge of entertainment at Camp Tamiment.

It was Max who also took an ambitious saxophone player from the Vacationland Hotel in Swan Lake and refined him into the big-time, high-class TV comicker Sid Caesar. It was also Max Liebman who first unleashed Danny Kaye’s comedic talents by casting him in the Yiddish version of
The Mikado
.

Danny owes not only his public success but also much of his private happiness to the mountains. During the winter, he worked for Dr. Samuel Fine, a dentist in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn to which Danny had migrated from Russia with his parents. He never noticed the boss’s bright-eyed daughter Sylvia until he found her slaving over a hot piano writing special material for a production at Camp Tamiment. In 1940 Danny Kaye and Sylvia Fine were married.

It was still another mountaineer who handed Danny his first chance on Broadway. Moss Hart saw his performance at La Martinique night club on 57th Street and wrote in a part for him in Kurt Weill’s
Lady in the Dark
, starring Gertrude Lawrence. Danny, Moss Hart and Broadway clicked from their very first meeting.

Jackie Mason started his career under the name of Jacob Masler. Jackie always found a way to get fired even years before he gave the finger to Ed Sullivan. Agent George Kuttin booked him on his first Catskills job at a haven called Sunrise Manor in Ellenville. Jackie loped out onstage and his first words were: “This place stinks.” They were also his last words. The boss tore backstage and threw him off the premises before he could say “A funny thing happened to me on the way to the synagogue.”

Before long Jackie, who comes from a rabbinical family and studied to be a rabbi himself, quickly became afflicted with an occupational disease. He fast developed an acute case of spotlight-hogging. When he served as master of ceremonies at the Pioneer Hotel for one full season and had to introduce other comedians better known than himself, he would sometimes do a half-hour routine before presenting the guest star. And he’d very often borrow the guest’s own material. One Saturday night, before bringing on Phil Foster, the star of the show, he proceeded to knock off forty-five minutes of Phil’s best bits. When Phil was finally introduced, he shuffled slowly to the center of the stage and said, “How do you do, ladies and gentlemen. You just heard my act, so good night,” and walked off the stage and out of the hotel.

Leonard Hacker began his professional life in the Coney Island striptease act “Tirza and Her Wine Bath” because the boss let him drink the leftover grape. He became Buddy Hackett about twenty-five years ago when “my agent, Abby Greshler, changed my name at the time I auditioned for the part of ‘Henry Aldrich’ and lost out to Ezra Stone. I don’t know why he changed it. It was a perfectly good name and my father was a good upholsterer.”

Buddy and his père worked the Catskills together. He still remembers a hotel owner who paid his father $13 for 13 hours’ work as an upholsterer and tossed in a buck for Buddy’s efforts. Years later, that same proprietor wanted the roly-poly comic to play his hacienda. Buddy’s going rate at the time was $500 a night. He wouldn’t take the booking until he got $600—“plus $12 more for the lousy buck he paid me as a kid.”

Like everybody else, Buddy doubled in the dining room during those lean summers. “I never was a good waiter,” he insists. “If there was a long line in the kitchen I’d go back to my station and say, ‘We ain’t got it. Pick sumptin’ else.’ Or I’d start toomling in the kitchen and the waiters would forget the customers were waiting.”

Our hero made the transition to comedian when a regularly scheduled comic failed to show up. “I was sixteen and the five dollars looked good,” Hackett grins. “It was a disaster. They not only didn’t laugh, but it looked as though they were comin’ up onstage to kill me. I finished out the season in another hotel—but as a waiter!”

The following Memorial Day he rammed a car into a hotel porch in Swan Lake just to get attention. On July Fourth he stuffed dry cereal into the dining room fan and roared when the maître d’ turned it on and created an indoor snowstorm. His string of triumphs was broken only by the arrival of winter, which Buddy spent as caretaker of skis, skates and toboggans at Grossinger’s.

Came the first thaw, he talked another inn into hiring a friend as a lifeguard. The friend couldn’t swim and they both got fired.

If Mary Martin’s heart belongs to Daddy, Buddy Hackett’s belongs to the Concord. That’s the spot that gave him his first break as a five-dollar-a-night comic. Many scrapbooks later that’s where he met Sherry Dubois, a mambo instructor, and where he married her.

Out of the summer camps in the twenties and thirties emerged such illustrious figures as Don Hartman, Dore Schary, Lorenz Hart, Garson Kanin, Arthur Kober and Moss Hart. Moss Hart had painful memories of his Catskill apprenticeship. “Social directing,” he wrote, in his book
Act One
, “provided me with a lifelong disdain and a lasting horror of people in the mass seeking pleasure and release in packaged doses. Perhaps the real triumph of these summers was the fact that I survived them at all; not so much in terms of emergency with whatever creative faculties I possess unimpaired, but in the sense that my physical constitution withstood the strain, for at the end of each camp season I was always fifteen to twenty pounds lighter and my outlook in life just about that much more heavily misanthropic.”

He hated the campfire nights because he had to lead the community sing and drag out blankets and wood for the fire as well as franks and marshmallows. But what made him want to sink into the earth was the “boy-and-girl” number he had to do, complete with ukulele and fat female guest on his knee.

Game nights killed him altogether. “It is not easy to feel the proper compassion for a shy girl or an ugly duckling when you are tied into a sack with her and are hobbling down the social hall to the finish line,” Hart recalled. “On the contrary, rolling a peanut along the floor side by side with a bad-complexioned girl with thick glasses and unfortunate front teeth does nothing to kindle the fires of pity within you, but instead makes you want to kick her right in her unfortunate teeth.”

Another torment for Hart was the forced nightly gallantry. One rule that could never be broken under any circumstance was that the male members of the social staff had to dance
only
with the ugly females. There were sound reasons for this. Every summer camp had two or three women to every man, so the shrewd camp owners met the problem head-on by hiring help whose prime qualification was that they were good dancers. If a musician didn’t know his sax from a hole in the ground and if the waiter sloshed hot cabbage soup down the neck of a guest who was staying ten weeks, it didn’t matter so long as he “mixed and mingled” well in the social hall.

The big trouble lay in the fact that these college kids, our future doctors, lawyers and dentists, disliked dancing with the “pots” or “beasts,” as they called them. This meant that the full responsibility for the love life and social life of the “beasts” was in the hands of the Social Directors. This was what forever spoiled the pleasure of dancing for Moss Hart. “For six whole years,” Moss complained, “I danced with nothing but the pots, and that was enough to make me welcome the glorious choice of sitting down for the rest of my life.”

Certain of Hart’s friends suspect that those grueling hot-weather sessions, forcibly entertaining lonesome, sweaty young things, bred in him a deep distaste for marriage. He finally did get married to Kitty Carlisle—but not until he was forty-five.

When Francine Lassman divorced Xavier Cugat, she retained custody of her stage name, Abbe Lane. After all, how would it look for an alumna of the Jewish Alps, who comes from Brooklyn, to be billed as Francine Lassman, the Latin Bombshell?

Abbe’s first appearance on stage had far from a Latin beat—it had more of a Borscht Belt. Gracie and Abby Lassman were friends of Henry Tobias, the songwriter-producer, then the impresario of Totem Lodge. Henry arranged for them to manage the canteen concession for the summer, and naturally their luggage included their daughter. Fourteen-year-old Francine was overdeveloped for her age—in fact, for
any
age. Mommy was anxious for her to become a star, but the kid showed more cleavage than talent. At any rate, you can’t keep a good stage mother down, and Gracie was the best.

She nagged away until finally Henry stuck Francine into one of his amateur shows. Gracie arranged for her “wee baby Francey” to gurgle one of his songs, and hammy Henry, who was always scratching around for somebody to plug his tunes, immediately set her for his Saturday Night extravaganza.

Although it took Cugat to make her, a
star
that is, Henry still claims he developed her—
talent
, that is. Or maybe it was just that the borscht and sour cream went to her chest.

Jerome Levitch’s birth certificate was written with a stick of greasepaint, and his playpen was the hills of Fallsburgh and Loch Sheldrake. His father, Danny Levitch (alias Lewis), was a Jolson-type singer, and mama Rae was a piano player.

Every summer when his father answered the call of the mountains, the little son of Levitch was included in the deal. At fourteen he was a tearoom boy at Brown’s. And while the world didn’t yet know of Jerome’s existence, it’s for sure that the owners of Brown’s did. Born with a fractured funny bone, he would drop a whole tray of peach melbas or make a three-point landing in a pot of mashed potatoes just for a snicker. On a cold night he might even start a fire in the tearoom—and it didn’t have a fireplace!

At fifteen the skinny kid who needed help to lift his toothbrush signed on as athletic director at the Majestic Hotel in Fallsburgh. The patent dissimilarity between Jerry—who might have posed for the poster “Send this child to camp”—and any physical culturist living or dead was purely hysterical. The job was custom-tailored to Jerry’s sense of humor.

He pestered his father all summer for jokes and by Labor Day was set to make his mark on immortality. Mom and Pop tried keeping him out of show business as long as they could, but that’s like trying to keep Bobby Kennedy down on the farm. So the kid adopted his parents’ name to become Jerry Lewis the record-pantomime act, and Danny and Rae gave in and got him booked into a saloon in Jersey for a fin a night.

On opening night they decided to telephone the club to find out how he did. They didn’t want to say who was calling lest they make Jerry nervous, but they knew they could tell how things had gone by the way he sounded. So Danny hit on the idea of disguising his voice and pretending to be a booker who wanted to offer Jerry a job.

“Hello,” he crooned into the receiver. “Is this Jerry Lewis? This is Al Rock, the agent. I liked your act tonight and would like to use you on some of my dates.”

“Gee, thanks a lot, mister,” Jerry breathed excitedly. “But how can you like my act? I haven’t been on yet.”

It was a long road for Joey Gottlieb, who first wormed into the mountains during the summer of 1938. At a cockomaimie Loch Sheldrake hacienda, the Gottlieb Trio was offered eight dollars a head, plus room and scraps. The morning after Labor Day they went to collect their salary and found the place deserted—office, kitchen, everything. “I was glad I had taken a stand,” says Joey. “I had insisted laundry had to be included. They said okay because they knew they weren’t going to pony up anyway. In the end it worked out about even.”

A few flops later, Joey Gottlieb changed his name to Joey Bishop. “If it weren’t for the few laughs I got,” he says, “I might have been a rabbi. But it’s just as well I’m not. How would that sound: Rabbi Bishop?”

Sam Levenson was one of the few who made it without bobbing his name. He figured that if Gentiles like Danny Thomas and Jimmy Durante didn’t change their noses, he could stick with his inheritance.

The recollections of this ex-schoolteacher who worked his way through college as a musician at summer resorts are only beautiful: “Even in those days the mountains had everything: girls, bedbugs, handball, chicken (for ten weeks straight one summer), milk hot from the hot cow, swimming in a pool about the same size as in the picture postcard, and nature—manure at my window.

“It seemed to me at the time that I was immortal. Guests came and went but I stayed on forever. I listened each Sunday to the great debate: ‘If we leave at seven in the morning we can beat the afternoon rush.’ ‘But we are entitled to lunch’ … ‘but after lunch the rush starts’ … ‘so we can stay till the evening.’ ‘But that means we may have to wait till dinner, and they’ll charge us five dollars for dinner. Besides, at night you meet the rush that stayed on to beat the rush, so let’s stay on ‘til Monday’ … ‘What! And pay them for an extra day? Besides, the longer you stay the bigger the tip!’”