Tag: George Jessel

In Your Hat, pt. 8

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Here’s Chapter 8 of In Your Hat, the 1933 tell-all memoir by Hat Check Girl to the Stars, Renee Carroll, in which she shares tales of by the many celebrities she encountered while working at Sardi’s, among them George Burns and Gracie Allen, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Norma Talmadge, George Raft, Wallace Reid, Ginger Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks, and many more.

     A STOOGE, in Broadway parlance, is the assist in the act. If you do an accordion routine and a heckler is paid by you to annoy your act from the box, then you’re probably Phil Baker and your stooge eventually becomes as famous as you are. Witness Sid Silvers of Take a Chance fame.
     Broadway is full of stooges, both in real life and on the stage. It may sound strange to you but the jester in the king’s court from the time of The Erl King (I don’t know why they insist on spelling Oil as Erl) has been brought down the years until now he is labeled “stooge.” His job is to take he hard knocks, furnish the opportunity for the gag to be sprung, and appear the perfect fool.
     When Phil Baker, who pumps a mean accordion, opened in a show in New York and had a stooge in the box doing the regular routine, Al Boasberg, the gagman who writes funny lines for a dozen or more comedians, wired Baker:

  LIKED YOUR ACT STOP THE OLD
GENT WITH THE ACCORDION WAS
GOOD TOO.


     Gracie Allen, of the famous team of Burns and Allen, is the stooge of the act, even though it is she who pulls all the funny lines. Recently she gave George Burns cause to laugh when she came to him with an idea.
     “Georgie, dear,” Gracie said. “I have an idea.”
     “Well, let’s forget it,” George answered characteristically, knowing it would bring on the usual headache.
     “I’ve thought of a line for our act,” she continued.
     “All right,” gave in George. “What is it?”
     “I can’t tell you until I’ve gotten a prop.”
     “What sort of a prop?”
     “A muff.”
     “What’s a muff?” George wanted to know.
     “It’s one of those things women used to carry around so that they could hold hands with themselves.”
     “All right, Gracie, get yourself a muff and let’s have the gag.”
     She went to the best furrier on the Avenue and ordered a muff made. It has to be matched sables, four skins, exquisitely sewn. The muff cost $250 and she charged it to Geroge Burns, her husband. She brought it to him one day.
     “Here’s the muff, George.”
     He examined it carefully. He approved.
     “I got it at a bargain, George.”
     George immediately became suspicious.
     “How much, Gracie? How much?” he pleaded.
     “Well—er—two hundred and—er—fifty dollars.”
     George felt around for support.
     “Two hundred and fifty smackers for that thing? Gracie, you’ll ruin me!”
     “But it’s a bargain, George, and the furrier let me have it at that price because there are two holes in it!”
     And she held up the muff to show him the holes in which one is supposed to insert one’s hands. Burns was nonplused.
     “But what about the gag?” he wanted to know. “Is the gag worth $250?”
     “Why, George,” giggled the she-stooge, “I just did it. You see, I come on with this muff and you ask me how much I paid for it and I say: ‘I got it at a bargain because it had two holes in it.”
     With which Mr. Burns fainted dead away. And that’s how jokes are born in case you’re interested.
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In Your Hat, pt. 3

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Here’s Chapter 3 of In Your Hat, the 1933 tell-all memoir by Hat Check Girl to the Stars, Renee Carroll:

     It was about the time that Agnes O’Laughlin, one of Zeigfeld’s “Whoopee” girls, and the girl who sued Rudy Vallée for breach of promise, cracked that Vallée was a megaphony, that the Owney Madden thing happened.
     The night before that I was at the Cotton Club on a party and Agnes was complaining generally about things. Referring to Rudy, her pet knick-knack at the moment, she came out with some pertinent remarks. She was feeling pretty bitter about “Sleepy” Vallée. Finally she cracked:
     “He’s supposed to be what girls are before they’re married.”
     “You mean a virgin?” somebody asked politely.
     “Well, I suppose so,” Agnes retorted.
     But Agnes was very optimistic, because nowadays the only virgins on Broadway are the lady at the foot of Civic Virtue and Mitzi Green. Well, I’m sure about Mitzi.
     Immediately following that Cotton Club party, which ended about noon the next day, I was walking down Broadway on my way to work when a man I knew stopped me a moment to chat. He happened to be a member of Owney Madden’s mob, but that was all right with me just as long as he mentioned mother once in a while.
     We had been standing there for a few moments when another fellow passed us and signaled “hello” to the man to whom I was talking. It seems he said hello to me, too, but I didn’t hear him, and besides I’d never seen the zany before in all my life.
     He seemed to resent my not talking to him because after taking a few steps he turned around and sneered something that sounded like “lousy broad, not saying hello to a guy” through the corner of his tobacco-stained mouth.
     “Know that heel?” my boy friend muttered.
     “I never saw him before in my life,” I told him.
     “Well, what do you know about that?”
     I didn’t think anything of it because the little fellow had kept on walking after saying something that was supposed to be an insult. I forgot the whole incident in a moment.
     But my friend didn’t forget it. At three o’clock that same afternoon one of the big boys of the mob was around at Sardi’s.
     “You Renee Carroll?” he asked, looking around shiftily.
     “Yes.”
     “Well, Owney Madden wants to see you right away.”
     “See me? Don’t be silly. What’s the idea?”
     “You ain’t done nothing, sister. It’s just to talk for a coupla minutes. Come along, you won’t get hurt.”
     Little Renee decided it best to go along quietly, and I got my hat and coat and followed the apparent gangster to a building in the West Forties where we entered an office marked with the name of some phony real estate company.
     Once inside we entered an inner office and I was confronted with what seemed to poor me to be a scene out of an M-G-M gangster picture.
     Seated around a long table were a dozen of the Owney Madden mob. They were all fairly nice-looking boys, leaning a bit toward the fat side and muscular enough to be ample guard for the “chief.” Owney himself, the man who has his finger in more rackets, night clubs and other ventures in New York City than any other individual, was at the head of the table. I knew him fairly well.
     We exchanged greetings.
     “Everything all right with you, Renee?” he wanted to know.
     “Sure, Owney. Everything’s fine.”
     “Positive?”
     “Yeah, certainly. Say, what’s the idea of the city fathers meeting here? I’m not on the spot, am I?”
     The boys didn’t snicker. They kept straight faces. I sensed that something important was turning over in their minds. Owney came around to where I stood.
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