Dat's My Boithday Who Said Dat

Over the course of time, Jimmy Durante went from enthusiastic hokum in the 1920s with songs like “If Washington Needs Me, I’ll Answer the Call” to sentimental schmaltzy hokum in the 1960s with songs like “Smile” and “September Song.” I love the former and will forgive the latter simply because it’s Jimmy Durante.

Adjectives like “beloved” fell on him. And deservedly so. Few bad words were ever spoken about him and he always seems to have really loved being in front of an audience.

It’s Schnozzola’s birthday today, so let’s pass along a couple of birthday stories from the major wire services. The first is from 1963, the second saw print seven years later.

Durante Marks 70th Birthday
By GENE PLOWDEN
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (AP)—Jimmy (the Schnozz) Durante admitted today he had a birthday—his 70th—"but I don't want every body to know about it."
The veteran entertainer, interviewed at a hotel where he Is appearing, described it this way:
"Thank God I had another birthday. Da party? Sure. It was after da show an’ they asked me if I didn’t want to come in and have some tea. It was a big surprise to me. We had a wonderful time.
"Mrs. Morris Lansburgh (whose husband owns the hotel) gave it. He's in Las Vegas. A few of my friends was there—George Raft, Eleanor Holm, Rocky Marciano, Little Jack Carter, Gene Bayless, Peter Lawford and a lot of others.
"I wanted to go four rounds wit’ Rocky, but he wouldn't take me on. Everybody had a lot of fun."
Durante does an hour and 15-minute show and keeps going night after night.
"No other entertainers—just us," he said.
Between shows Monday night he entertained the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association at their annual banquet.
The record says Durante was born in Brooklyn in 1893 and that he started in show business at 17, which means he’s starting his 54th year on the stage.
"Who th’ hell knows?” he snorted. “In my day, we didn't have no doctors. Everybody had midwives. Maybe I picked da date at random. Nobody had birth certificates in them days.
"I could'a said 1910 or somein'. Maybe I should'a picked a date like that. I had a lot of trouble gettin’ to Europe In 1936, ’cause I never had no birth certificate. I never did find one.
"But it’s been a lot of fun, and I’ll go on as long as I can—as long as they come to see me and I can make ’em happy.”

'The Nose' Marks 78th Year
By VERNON SCOTT
UPI Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD (UPI) - “Da nose may be 78 years old but not da man what owns it," quoth Jimmy Durante on his birthday.
Jimmy stroked his proboscis with affection. “Doesn't look a day older, does it?"
The beloved comedian moved with energy, his legs spry, his eyes atwinkle. He is astonishingly agile for a man of his years which he explains is due to his never having drunk alcohol.
“Thank God the birthdays keep coming around," the great Durante rasped. “I certainly wouldn’t want to miss one."
Recently Returned Home
Durante returned recently from Las Vegas where he starred in his own revue at one of the hotels on the desert town's famed Strip. He still sings the same songs, throws his hat at his drummer, wrecks the piano and straightens his tie while ogling girls.
The spotlight narrows on Jimmy as he sings “September Song" in a memorable rendition which brings audiences to their feet, as he did this week at a testimonial dinner to producer Stanley Kramer. Durante, married to his wife Margie for 11 years, works only about half the year. The rest of the time he spends at home in Beverly Hills or in Del Mar, Calif.
His 9-year-old daughter, Cecille, keeps him young.
“She’s a wonderful little girl and I spend all the time I can with her,” the entertainer said.
“So I'm on the threshold of middle age. That’s fine with me. I expect to go another 70 years. From here I go to Chicago and then to Philadelphia. By June I’ll be back playing at one of Mr. Howard Hughes' establishments in Vegas.”
How will the Great Schnozz celebrate his birthday?
“I’d like to let it slip by nice and quiet. Me and Marge and a few friends will go out to dinner. Then I’ll go home and go to bed early—which is what I always do when I’m not working."
And what would Jimmy like to have for a birthday present?
“Another good year," he replied. “And a few more winners at the race track. That would be the cream on the boithday cake!”

Unfortunately, he didn’t have “another good year.” In September, he checked into hospital in Santa Monica for exhaustion and then had a stroke in November. He cancelled a TV appearance with Julie Andrews planned for that month and when AP writer Bob Thomas caught up with him in 1975, he was in a wheelchair and speaking slowly during a phone interview. He was gone just after the start of 1980.

To paraphrase some hokum, Happy birthday, Mr. Durante, wherever you are.

Horsing Around With Durante

Everybody wants ta get inta de act! Including Jimmy Durante’s parakeet.

United Press International’s Hollywood reporter wrote a three-parter on Schnozz for papers at the end of 1959. It apparently was necessary to employ Durante’s dialect when quoting him. Even when it was Durante’s parakeet quoting Durante.

We’ve posted the other two parts. Here’s the third. It’s funny to read Durante was as quirky at the race track as you might expect.

Variety reported in April 1960 the proposed Frank Capra-Columbia picture on Durante’s life story was dead. The trade paper suggested everyone behind it really weren’t all that enthusiastic to make the movie.

Off-Stage Durante—Final Article: Writer Spends Hectic Day With The Schnozz
(This is the last of three dispatches on the private life of Jimmy Durante. Here's what it's like to spend a day with the colorful comedian).
By VERNON SCOTT
UPI Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD (UPI) — Jimmy Durante, bleary-eyed with sleep, staggered from the bedroom of his seven-room house in Beverly Hills dressed in old-fashioned blue wool swimming trunks and a brocade dressing gown.
“How're ya?" he asked, walking into the breakfast room.
Sitting down at the table, Durante flipped through the mail. His pet parakeet, "Tinker," flew to his shoulder and piped, "Good morning, Jimmy. I got a million o' dem."
Durante looked pleased, "Cute, ain't he," Jimmy said, then, in a louder voice, "I'm ready when you are, Maggie."
With Him 25 Years
Maggie White, Jimmy's maid, has been with him for 25 years. On occasion she has gone without pay during the rough years. She is completely devoted to the comedian. This morning she served prune juice, milk, toast and tea. Jimmy swallowed an assortment of pills with his juice.
"It looks like a nice day out," he said. "I think I'll go out to da track and watch the horses run. It's a beautiful sight to see."
Jirnmy ate his breakfast slowly announcing that he eats lightly. He smokes 10 cigars a day, but abstains from alcohol except for an occasional glass of sherry. "Funny t'ing," he said. "I get more tired when I ain't workin' than when I'm on the stage. Some people might consider this a catastrastroke, but not me.
Da Audience Da Reason
"I'm never tried when I come off the stage. The excitement of da audience keeps me going, expecially when I can see them smilin' faces.
"Nachelly, I get tired traveling around the country, but as long as I get my eight hours sleep I'm all right."
Breakfast finished, Jimmy fired up his first cigar of the day and walked into his den. The walls were crowded with plaques, pictures arid mementos of his long career. There also were photographs and paintings of horses.
“So you’re going to write a story about me?” he asked. “Well, that’s fine, but I don’t want nobody to put me on a pedasill.
“This year I’m gonna do four of my own TV shows, and a couple guest shots. But what I really wanta do is make more TV shows before da movie cameras. I got 16 fillums of my old program—which I owns outright. If I could get another 10, then I could make it a regular series. Like for reruns, too.”
Jimmy dressed quickly, awaiting his friend and piano player, Jules Buffano, for a junket to Del Mar racetrack.
On the trip to the track Jimmy studied the racing form carefully, marking down his choices. But his pre-race picks seldom are the ones he bets, He's the easiest man, in Hollywood to tout off or on to a horse, even by novice players.
Racing General
Once in the turf club, Durante issued orders like a general. Friends and track employes deployed themselves to the betting windows with Durante money clenched in their fists. The general puffed his cigar furiously, exchanging confidential tips with his aides.
Then, secretively, before each race, Jimmy disappeared to make the master bet of the race. In the confusion, the old Schnozzola was never quite sure whether he had won or lost.
On the return trip to Beverly Hills Jimmy went into a huddle with himself to determine the results of the day.
"It ain't no use tryin' to figger out how much I won, or maybe lost," he said finally. "I forgot how much money I started with."
Back in his home, Jimmy stoked another stogie and plopped down in an easy chair. He planned to have a quiet dinner with his girl friend, red-haired Margie Little, whom he has dated for some 14 years.
Thereafter she would return to her own home and the "boys" would show up a few at a time to sit around and gab.
"I ain't ever considered retirin'," Jimmy said, exhailing a billow of smoke. "As long as work is fun, then I'm for it. When it ain't fun no more I'll quit. "Lotsa times the newspapers say I'm gonna put the Schnozz out to pasture and take life easy. So far I ain't got no plans in that particular direction. "It ain't such a bad life," he concluded. Then, flapping his arms to his sides, he added, "And they're gonna make a picture of my life."
Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin are planning to film "The Jimmy Durante Story" with Martin playing Jimmy, Sinatra as Lou Clayton, and Crosby as Eddie Jackson. The old Schnozz himself will act as technical advisor to the project.

The Urchin With the Nose

Jimmy Durante was loved because he came across as a sincere guy, who rose from poverty through hard work to become someone. People love that kind of story. Durante loved his audiences, so his audiences pulled for him.

A while ago, we posted the first of a three-part series from United Press International on Durante. Here’s the second part which goes into his early years. It appeared in papers in November and December 1959. Part three will be posted later.

The Remarkable Schnozzola
Clayton Joins Durante's Stage Team and a Great Star is Born
By Vernon Scott
HOLLYWOOD (UPI)—What would you do if you became the parent of a baby that looked like Jimmy Durante?
That's what happened to Barthelmeo Durante, a barber, and his Italian-born wife, Rosea Milliao Durante, back in February 1893. Even to these kindly people Jimmy's appearance came as something of a shock. His gargantuan nose was as proportionately striking then as it is today.
But the outsized proboscis came in handy when Jimmy was an odd-looking little urchin selling papers in New York. People became customers for laughs, unwittingly shaping the boy's future as a comedian.
“I'm peddling papers along the streets, passing the jernts and peeping under the swinging doors," Jimmy recalled. "I'm thinkin’ the swellest job in the world is the guy banging da piano in a saloon. I wants to be him."
Pianist at 16
After a couple of years of lessons the Schnozz' dream came true. At 16 he was punishing the 88 in a third-rate Coney Island gin mill glitteringly emblazoned "Diamond Tony's."
Jimmy moved on to another joint, a cut above Diamond Tony's in New York's Chinatown. This one was called the Chatham Club. It was during this stage of his life that he fell in love with a girl he identifies only as Gladie. The nose had been tweaked by cupid and was all for marching to the altar. Gladie, however, jilted the funny-looking little piano player for a guy with a reasonable nose. Durante was heartbroken.
He remained a bachelor, hobnobbing with the Manhattan hoods of the era, and becoming increasingly popular as a ragtime pianist.
Then in 1918 he met Maud Jeanne Olson, a Midwestern girl who wandered into the club Alamo in Harlem where Jimmy was working with a five-piece combo. They were married in June, 1921.
Joins Jackson

By this time the Schnozz had joined forces with Eddie Jackson. They became a successful team in the smoke-shrouded saloons. It wasn't until 1924 that Lou Clayton, the man who exerted the most influence on Jimmy, joined the act to make it one of the most famous of the roaring '20's.
The partners opened the Club Durante, and shrewd businessman Clayton ran the team. Jimmy was devoted to Clayton, and still is.
"I loved that man," Jimmy said. "He was the finest, most honest guy I ever knew. He made me a star—that's what he did."
Vaudeville paged the trio during the late '20's and early '30's and all three partners prospered, blowing their earnings on high living and gambling. In 1932 Jimmy bucketed off to Hollywood to star in the movies with Clayton acting as business manager and Jackson stringing along for laughs. But the pattern was broken. Jimmy stood alone as the star.
The Great Day
"Yeah, them were the great days," Durante recalled. "There was something doing every minute."
But the carefree prosperity palled. Jimmy's pictures began to slow down at the box office, and by the early '40's work wasn't easy to find. The partners split up.
Jeanne died in 1943, and Jimmy still visits her grave. Clayton, after a long, painful illness, passed away in 1950. Until his death, Clayton's doctor and hospital bills were picked up by little Mr. Malaprop. Whenever his old friends died Jimmy paid for the funerals.
When the movie rug was pulled out from under him, Jimmy went to work on radio and returned to night clubs, making ends meet and conquering new fields. "But I never changed my act, and Eddie Jackson came back with me," he said. "Audiences would be disappointed in me if I didn't sing all the old tunes, like 'Inka Dinka Do.'
Same Songs
"I been doin' some of them songs 20-25 years. It's all a part of the Durante tempo—‘I know I Can Do Without Broadway, But Can Broadway Do Without Me?’ and 'Have You Ever Had the Feeling that You Wanted to Go. And Still Had the Feeling That You Wanted to Stay?'
"They is ageless on accounta the tempo. They ain't got lyrics in 'em like ‘Wait 'Till the Sun Shines Nelly.’"
Jimmy's butchered lingo is not strictly an act. He never went beyond the seventh grade. But in typical Durante secrecy, he refuses to say how much of his mangled syntax is purposeful. When asked, he merely gets a twinkle in his eye.
"It's mortifyin’ sometimes to have people laugh at the way I talk," he grinned. But it's also satisfying. However them are the conditions that prevail." Another Durante secret is his famed signoff line, "Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, Wherever You are!”
Jimmy won't tell anyone the meaning of his mysterious, but deadly serious adieu. The two best guesses are that Mrs. Calabash was an affectionate nickname either for his wife or for Clayton. But no amount of wheedling will extract a straight answer.
"I ain't talkin’ about it,” Jimmy says flatly. "It's a very special thing to me, with a very special meanin’. Maybe some people have guessed the meaning of it. But they'll never hear it from my lips." (Next: A day with the Schnozz).

Durante

He moved to Hollywood in 1932 but Jimmy Durante never lost that 1920s New York speakeasy entertainer atmosphere about him, even four decades later.

His act was old-fashioned hokum when radio made his career explode again, but audiences loved it. They were taken in by Durante’s sincere enthusiasm for the old numbers and corny jokes. He was impossible to dislike.

In the late ’50s, United Press International put out on the newswire a three-part series on Durante. As is usual in show biz, with happiness comes sadness, too. You can read that in this first part that began appearing in papers on November 5, 1959. I’ll try to get to the other two parts in future posts.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF JIMMY DURANTE
Comedian Soft Touch
By VERNON SCOTT
UPI Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD – The curtain goes up, the ricky-ticky music blares out, “Who Will Be With You When You're Far Away?” and a ramshackle old man struts jauntily on stage.
The music fades away. "I'm walking into de theater mindin' my own business when dis man comes up and sez, 'I reconize the face, but the nose ain't familiar.' So I ups to him and he ups to me and I sez, 'Any friend of mine, is also a friend of thuh nose.' "
Cackling merrily, the bald little guy breaks into a dance. He pounds the piano. He sings off-key. He spouts another joke in a voice that cracks plaster. He's Jimmy Durante, 66 years old.
A secretive man who baffles even hit closest associates, the old Schnozzola is beloved but not well-known in Hollywood. Fifty years in show business has not separated fact from fiction, and Durante does everything possible to confuse legend with reality.
Example: Jimmy has lived in the same Beverly Hills house for 20 years. His friends insist the Schnozz never has been in the swimming pool. They say it's typical of Durante's eccentricities. But Jimmy swears he goes for a dip every morning.
"Sure I do," he said hoarsely. "Why else have I got a pool?"
His compatriots merely lift their eyebrows in resignation.
The softest touch in the warm-hearted society of entertainers, Durante denies his charities and good works, perhaps to minimize future handouts, but it is known he gives away some $15,000 a year to organized charities and an equal amount to down-on-their-luck buddies. This may not sound like a lot of money for a big star, but Jimmy is not as wealthy as his Beverly Hills Neighbors.
"Aw," he says of his generosity, "I don't like discussin' them things."
Pressed on the subject, Jimmy smoothed down a fragile wisp of hair atop his head. "Well, lem-me see. There's the Jewish Home for the Aged, the Thalians (mentally retarded children), the Lighthouse for the Blind in New York and the Catholic Church among others. But please don't talk about it no more."
Durante's perverse nature crops up whenever his passion for horse races is mentioned. He vows his bets are small and infrequent, and made only at the track.
But I’ve seen him in action during many a TV rehearsal when he spends as much time with the racing form as he does with the script. Jimmy’s sidekick and friend of 42 years, Eddie Jackson, shuttled between Durante and the telephone placing bets. On one occasion Jimmy was astonished to find he’d bet on every horse in a single race.
Yet he will tell you he’s not a real horse player.
“I don’t know how to gamble—and I never won on the horses during a season in my life.”
Then why is he the inveterate plunger?
“I like to see ‘em run,” he grinned sheepishly.
Purposefully or not, Jimmy Durante will twist and sidetrack a conversation so skilfully most people are unaware he is escaping painful subjects. And there have been many painful episodes in the comedian’s life.
His cheerful, raucous on-stage personality gives way to thoughtful reflection when Jimmy is alone. He speaks and thinks about the past a great deal, but not regretfully. He enjoys the nostalgia, re-living the good old days when Clayton, Jackson and Durante were the toast of New York.
Durante's life has been a series of professional and emotional ups of and downs. He's seen good times and bad in night clubs, movies, radio and television The death of his wife, the passing of his partner Lou Clayton, a disastrous love affair in his youth and other tragedies played an important role in shaping Jimmy's way of life.
Jimmy is fiercely loyal to his troupe of seven regulars who surround him on his night club and TV skirmishes.
"I gotta keep 'em workin'," he explained, before enumerating his tight little band. "My drummer, Jack Roth, has been with me 41 years. Eddie Jackson (with whom he squabbled last year) and I been together 42 years, and Jules Buffano, my piano player, has been around 17 years.
“Then there's Louis Cohen, he attended lots of things, and he's been working for me for 40 years. Lemme see. I think it's 24 years Bill Stocker has been driving me around and taking care of me. My press agent Joe Bleeden, has been with me nine years. Sonny King, my new singer, is a two-year man. They're all my boys."
The "boys" make the big-beaked word-mangler's home their own. They drop by at all hours of the day and night to keep the boss happy.
It's a surprisingly democratic clan, in contrast with the sycophants who generally congregate around a star. His pals adjust themselves to Jimmy's schedule which keeps them up until 5 and 6 in the morning hashing over the "good old days."

Hot-Cha-Cha in the Cold

Blizzards, downpour, lightning, twisting wind. It all hits the Aleutians, Isles of Enchantment, in a 1945 cartoon starring Private Snafu.

After the storm, the camera pulls back. “My gracious!” says the narrator who isn’t Bob Bruce, “Such conditions are almost unbelievable.” The scene now includes a walrus in the foreground. The walrus turns around the reveal a familiar face and catchphrase.



“Never-de-less, dat’s the conditions dat prevail!” says the Jimmy Durante walrus (played by Mel Blanc). Unfortunately, he didn’t end with a Durante-esque “Hot-cha-cha-cha!” He makes a repeat appearance at the end of the short.

This spot gag/travelogue cartoon was made by the Chuck Jones unit at Warners.

The Calabash Chronicle

Many people tried to solve the mystery surrounding Jimmy Durante’s Mrs. Calabash. Only one person—Durante—knew the answer, and he wasn’t telling.

But is that true?

No, according to the man who resurrected Durante’s career by teaming him on the radio with Garry Moore.

Here’s a two-page feature story from The American Weekly, one of those newspaper magazine supplements, dated July 30, 1961. It goes into the Calabash conundrum with a possible explanation. I always love how any newspaper story quoting Durante spells the words in Durante’s dialect. You can hear his voice when you read them.

By the way, you can read another possible explanation in this post.

WHO IS MRS. CALABASH?
Durante's secret "good night" gal is either a childhood sweetheart (says Jimmy) or a horse (it says here)
By JOE MCCARTHY
Somebody asked Jimmy Durante if his upcoming special on NBC television, in which he'll be assisted by a couple of much younger and less experienced performers named Bob Hope and Garry Moore, would end with the familiar and customary Jimmy Durante ending—a fond good night to a mysterious lady named Mrs. Calabash "wherever you are."
The explosive Mr. Durante, who still behaves offstage at the age of 68 with the same wild and jaunty abandon that he displays in his night-club and TV comedy act, turned on his questioner with an indignant stare and shouted hoarsely, "If they don't let me mention Mrs. Calabash in there, they're outa their minds!"
Jimmy, in other words, knows when he has a good thing going for him. Tell somebody you know Jimmy Durante and the first question you are asked about him is, "Who is Mrs. Calabash?" When he commutes in Hollywood between his two houses—one near the Sunset Strip occupied by his wife, Margie, whom he married last December, and his old bachelor residence in Beverly Hills, which he holds onto because he likes its shower bath—the passing truck drivers yell at him, "Hey, Jimmy, how's Mrs. Calabash?" Mrs. Calabash is almost as famous as Jimmy Durante and all sorts of legends and stories are told about her.
But not a word is said about her by Jimmy himself. Back in 1950, when the late Gene Fowler was working on the official Durante biography, Schnozzola, Jimmy talked freely to Fowler about everything else in his life story but he refused to talk about Mrs. Calabash. "That's my secret," Fowler quoted him as saying. "I want it to rest where it is."
Fowler reported in Schnozzola that two of Jimmy's closest friends leaned toward a belief that Mrs. Calabash was a widowed mother of a small boy who listened to the Durante radio show in the 1940s and exchanged letters with Jimmy. Fowler himself was inclined to feel, as many other people do, that Mrs. Calabash was Jimmy's first wife, Jeanne, who died in 1943.
I heard two other explanations of Mrs. Calabash in 1949 when I was writing an article about Durante for Cosmopolitan magazine. One, which I am inclined to believe, was given to me by Phil Cohan, who was the producer of the Durante radio show 15 years ago when Mrs. Calabash was first mentioned by Jimmy on the air.
Cohan said he and Durante, with the writers of the radio show, originally created Mrs. Calabash as a fictional joke. Each week, over a period of several weeks, Jimmy was to say good night to her solemnly at the end of the show.
Then, after building up curiosity in the listening audience about who Mrs. Calabash was, Jimmy was to reveal her as a race horse on which he had lost several thousand dollars at various tracks over the years.
"We got the name from a pipe I was smoking when we first talked over the idea," Cohan said. "My pipe reminded me of the big pipe with the curved stem that Sherlock Holmes smoked, which was called a calabash because its bowl was made from a calabash gourd."
According to Cohan, the Mrs. Calabash joke proceeded as it was planned until one day, shortly before the scheduled revelation of her identity, when Jimmy was visiting friends at a Catholic monastery. A group of monks at the monastery asked him about Mrs. Calabash. He explained to them that the whole thing was only a gag and the monks were horrified. They pointed out that most people who listened to the show had come to believe that Mrs. Calabash was a real person. Exposing her as a comic hoax would only destroy the warm and touching image of her that Jimmy had created.
"Jimmy decided that the monks were right, as, of course, they were," Cohan said. "The race horse joke was dropped and Jimmy kept on mentioning Mrs. Calabash without telling who she was. As time went on, I think Jimmy began to associate the Mrs. Calabash he was saying good night to on the radio show with somebody he had known in his own past life. Now he actually believes that she is a real person. Ask him about her and see what he says."
A few days later, when I was alone with Durante at his Beverly Hills home, I did ask him who Mrs. Calabash was. He leaned back reflectively on the couch where he was resting and a faraway look came into his eyes.
"A kid I grew up with in New York," he said. "We was stuck on each other for a while but nuttin' ever came of it. Well, she married this other guy and they moved to Chicago and once in a while later on when I was playing in Chicago at the Chez Paree she useta drop in and say hello. But nuttin' out of the way. Just a nice kid."
That was 12 years ago. Nowadays Jimmy dismisses questions about Mrs. Calabash lightly without giving out any information.
"Jimmy," I asked him a few weeks ago, "who is Mrs. Calabash?" He gave me a roguish wink.

"Some day I'll tell ya," he said, "butcha won't be able to write it." Scheduled for next August 9th, the Jimmy Durante television special was designed by Goodman Ace, the George Bernard Shaw of TV comedy writing, but it is safe to assume that Jimmy on that Wednesday night will be the same old Schnozzola. He never seems to change or to slow down. Watching him clown and sing and stop the music to fly into a rage for an hour and a quarter during his slam-bang nightclub show, it is hard to believe that this is his 51st year in show business. He began in 1910 at the age of 17 as a piano player in a Coney Island saloon where Eddie Cantor worked as a singing waiter. "They kept me at that piano like I was chained to it," Jimmy says. "One night I got up for a coupla minutes to go to the washroom and the manager comes over to me and says, 'What are you tryin' to do—take advantage?'"
The inimitable Durante buffoonery has never changed since the early '20s when he teamed up with the late Lou Clayton and Eddie Jackson to become New York's favorite speakeasy and night-club entertainers. He is one of the few remaining headliners from the Prohibition period who is still going strong.
Jimmy has never had to worry about other comedians stealing his humor. Nobody else can get a big laugh as he does merely by stopping in the middle of a song and announcing to the audience, "If they hadn'ta cut off my curves when I was a kid, I'd be another Anna Marie Alberspaghetti!" He can also cause convulsions of mirth simply by declaring, out of a clear sky, "Up in Seattle, I have 1,283 acres of wooded land!"
Durante's songs are also burglar-proof because nobody but Durante can sing them effectively. He is the proprietor of the Jimmy Durante Music Publishing Company, which seldom does any business because nobody but Durante wants the Durante songs—So I Ups to Him . . . The Strut away . . . I Can Do Without Broadway, But Can Broadway Do Without Met . . . Who Will Be With You When I'm Far Away, Far Away In Far Rockaway? and, of course, the classic that Jimmy refers to as "our national emblem"—Inka Dinka Doo. If Jimmy forgets to sing Inka Dinka Doo his audience always demands it.
As he starts his second 50 years in show business, Jimmy keeps busier than ever. Except for an occasional TV engagement, such as August 9th's special, he concentrates on a steady diet of night-club work that would exhaust most younger men. He feels more comfortable in a night club than he does on television because "in a club, you scramble along getting laughs, doing anything that comes into your head without sticking to a script and worrying about what time it is," he explains. "That's the way I like it."
In May, after a long tour of appearances in such places as the Copacabana in New York, The Desert Inn in Las Vegas and the Chase Hotel in St. Louis, Jimmy and his vivacious wife hurried to Italy where he played in Vittorio Di Sica's movie, The Last Judgment. On the way home he stopped in Paris where he wore out his traveling companions by visiting every night club in the French capital in one night.
Then, before rehearsing and taping his forthcoming television show in Hollywood, he rushed to Harrah's Club in Lake Tahoe for another nightery date, accompanied by Margie and an entourage of 13 friends, co-partners and advisers. "I woulda brought more people with me only I'm still on my honeymoon," he explained.
His physical stamina is amazing. One of his recent night-club shows lasted much longer than usual because he became fond of the audience and hated to leave the stage. His partner, the young and muscular Sonny King, had to endure an extra load of abuse from Durante. Three times, when King tried to join in on a song that Durante was singing, he was strangled and hurled to the floor—"You gotta be 20 years with Durante before you can come that close to the mike!"
Then, holding his hat aloft and shaking his head. Durante stomped across the stage in a strutaway with Eddie Jackson, turning to admire a beautiful show girl—"If I mailed that home, I wouldn't know where to put the stamp! Is it cold outside, honey?"
"No," the girl said.
Jimmy went berserk.
"Who give this girl the permission to speak that line of dialogue?" he shouted. "Call the manager! Stop the music! Everybody wantsa get inna the act!"
The performance ran 20 minutes overtime. When it ended, I made my way backstage to see Durante. Sonny King was stretched out on a cot in his dressing room, exhausted, and Jackson was slumped wearily in a chair, trying to get his breath. Jimmy was contentedly eating two lamb chops and drinking a cup of tea and looking at an old movie on television.
"I could go back out there right now and do that whole thing all over again," he said.
Jimmy discussed his new television show with Bob Hope and Garry Moore and recalled that he had worked with both of these stars when they were starting their careers. Moore broke into big-time radio as Durante's partner on the same comedy show where Mrs. Calabash originated. Hope's first big role on Broadway was with Durante and Ethel Merman in Red, Hot and Blue in 1936. This recollection moved Jimmy to reminisce about his musical New Yorkers, the Cole Porter show of 1930, in which Clayton, Jackson and Durante appeared in one scene rowing a boat in the middle of the ocean. Durante shouted, "Land!"
"That's not land," Clayton said. "That's the horizon."
"Well, it's better than nuttin'!" Jimmy would snort. "We'll head for it anyway!"
Jimmy's marriage last December to the former Margie Little, his fiancée for the previous 16 years, has gone smoothly except for the complication it has caused in Jimmy's real estate holdings. Margie refuses to give up the house in the Hollywood Hills that Jimmy bought for her a few years ago. Jimmy is reluctant to leave the gray-shingled ranch-type residence in Beverly Hills where he has lived since 1945.
"I'm the only husband in California who is keeping His and Her houses," he complains. "One of us has got to move but Margie says it won't be her."
I asked him if there might be a question about the propriety of continuing to say good night on the air to the mysterious Mrs. Calabash now that he is a married man. Jimmy snickered.
"Margie managed to put up with Mrs. Calabash all during them years while we was engaged," he said. "So I guess she can share me with Mrs. Calabash for a few more years."

The Toughest Job in the Woild? A Comedian

Milton Berle. Ed Wynn. Abbott and Costello. Ken Murray. Jack Carson. They all had early success on television. And they were all gone after a handful of seasons.

TV audiences proved more fickle than those of network radio—albeit they were the same people. Perhaps it was a case of viewers got tired of seeing the same thing over again, week after week. Jack Benny and Red Skelton seemed to be exceptions.

Jimmy Durante suffered the same problem. He was one of the rotating hosts of Four Star Revue starting in 1950, then got his own variety show in 1954 that was finally cancelled two years later. But that wasn’t the end of Durante, of course. He travelled the route of other comedians and singers—along the I-15 to Las Vegas—and filled TV time with guest appearances and occasional specials.

Durante was quizzed about the conundrum of comedians who had been popular for years suddenly being punted off television. He talked about it to Hearst’s International News Service in a feature story that appeared in newspapers on June 18, 1957. How could TV do without a Cantor or a Berle? The same way radio did when Joe Penner and Al Pearce faded away. New talent came along. And it always will. But it won’t be the same. After all, there was only one Durante and there’ll never be another.

Unfortunately, this is an edited version of the story. Due to OCR errors, I can’t make out the full text on a lengthy version I found that mentions Durante relaxing at the Del Mar track and refusing to work when he’s watching the ponies.

TV Discard Of Comics A Favor, Says Durante
By Charles Denton
HOLLYWOOD ( INS ) – Jimmy Durante, who dislikes making a point of his long tenure as a “top banana,” believes television is doing his colleagues a favor by discarding them in bunches this season.
A year or two out of sight of the great glass eye, Durante contends is just what the doctor ordered for comics whose nerves have been rasped raw by the file of falling ratings.
Those with genuine, tested talent have nothing to fidget about, the Schnoz insists.
Durante, about to begin his second season without a TV show to call his own, was the picture of an unruffled vacationeer from video as he tucked his wiry frame into the corner of a leather couch in his den, lilted stocking feet to a chair and put the torch to a cigar.
"How can they ever do without laughs?” he demanded with a snort. “How can they ever do without a Gleason, a Berle, a Cantor? They’ll never be off for long. "What is it? You think talent that just come up in a month is gonna beat talent it's took 20 years to develop? That's like throwin' a Steinway out the window and takin' a piano some guy just made outta chicory wood."
Durante's snort grew even more disdainful at the widespread notion that the comic has had his day in the TV sun and the medium is now entering a "singers' era."
"Ahhh," he said meaningfully. "A guy writes a song and another guy goes out and sings it. What is that? It means the guy has a God-given voice, that's all. "A comedian has the toughest job in the world—THE TOUGHEST—and they never get no academy awards neither.

"In pictures the comic has the position the piano player had when I started in the business—a bum! But when they want somebody to emcee their awards, who do they look for? They want a Jerry Lewis or somebody like that."
Durante's present position in television is unique. Although still under contract to NBC, he made only one guest appearance last season and frankly admits that "I didn't want to do any. I wanted to be off a year, after six years.”
He would have undertaken another regular weekly show next season if he had been offered the right format—"just music and entertainment. What we tried to do before. Where can you get music and a couple of laughs?"
And if he could have done the shows "on fillum."
"Change? What do you change to?" he said almost wistfully. "There's only one thing to do. Either go dramatic or stay the way you are."
Like most veterans. Durante is sold on filmed shows because they can be shown dozens of times, each time bringing the performers welcome "residual."
But for the most part, Durante’s antics for the rest of the year will be confined to nightclubs, where he first began building himself into a show business legend an undetermined number of years ago.
Some say this is Jimmy's 50th year in show business. Others say he's been around much longer. Jimmy says he started in 1912 "but what the hell, who goes by anniversaries?"
Whatever his years, Durante is a long, long walk from the wheelchair. He returned only recently from a five-month nightclub tour.
Night club performing, a killer to most TV and movie-raised young performers, is caviar and champagne to Durante.
"After the first night, what's tough about it?" he scoffs. "So you don't finish up 'til two in the morning, you don't go to bed at home 'til then, do you?"
Bedtime is more often 3 or 4 a.m., a habit formed by decades of pounding pianos and cracking gags in smoky bistros. This is what might be called "clean dissipation," since Jimmy does not drink and compensates for the late hours he keeps by sleeping away most of the morning. When he does shake himself out of the feathers, however, he literally vibrates with activity.
"I'm a very busy man, very busy," he sighed. "And not a nickel coming in. That phone rings all day, and at the end of the day I look in the book and I ain't got a dollar more."

From all of here at the Tralfaz blog, here’s a cheery holiday song from one of the greats of show biz.

The Night Owl Who Was a Friend to Bass

“Ya gotta start out each day widda song!” Jimmy Durante (“In poy-sun!”) enthusiastically belted out when he made his entrance on his radio show in the 1940s. But it turns out he started out each day with toast. If that.

Audiences loved Durante and Durante loved audiences. In the first four months of 1955, he was alternating with Donald O’Connor on television’s Texaco Star Theater (the better-paid O’Connor was dumped and Durante took over three weeks of the month), took part in a grand opening special (in pre-peacock NBC colour), was a presenter at the Emmys, and attended spring training in Florida with the Brooklyn Dodgers. And when Mario Lanza didn’t appear on opening night for his act at the Venus Room of the Hotel New Frontier in Vegas, Durante—who was in the audience waiting for the show to start!—immediately jumped on stage and ad-libbed a whole act solo. He even found time to perform at a police benefit in Los Angeles, staging a publicity photo for it showing him objecting to a traffic cop writing him a ticket while pulled over in a police cruiser.

The Associated Press caught up with him for this story that appeared in papers starting March 26, 1955. You have to read it in Durante’s verse, uh, voice.

Durante, 62 Continues Working at Furious Pace
By BOB THOMAS

HOLLYWOOD—(AP)—How does the Schnoz do it?
Jimmy Durante turned 62 last month, yet he has lost none of his vitality. He continues working at a furious pace. He is doing 20 TV shows this season, all but two of them on a live basis. He'll do 30 shows next season. When he draws a couple of weeks away from TV, he often spends them playing his explosive act in Miami, New York, Reno or Las Vegas night clubs.
This is his off-week on his regular TV show and he's filling the time by appearing on NBC's spectacular to open its 3 1/2-million-dollar color studio in Burbank Sunday.
I tried to learn Jimmy's magic formula for energy over lunch at a Sunset Strip eatery. Lunch for Jimmy was some hot tea and toast. He explained that he had just gotten up and had already eaten a bowl of hot cereal.
"Me, I never feel hungry," he explained. "Eatin' don't mean nuttin' to me. I'll have maybe some cereal and toast for breakfast, and no lunch. For dinner I might have a lamb chop. Or if I don't feel hungry, it might be a bowl of corn flakes or somethin' like that.
"I can't understand it, because my dad was a big eater. He was eatin' the spaghetti until he was 92, washin' it down with wine. When I told him he should drink water, he said, 'water is for washin' the face; wine is to drink.'
"The guys around me, they love to eat. Comes six o'clock and [Eddie] Jackson gotta have dinner, regular as clockwork. If the boys wait for me, they, gonna eat around nine o'clock."
Because of his night club upbringing, Jimmy is a night owl. He prowls around his house until 1 or 2 in the morning, reading letters and studying music. He gets up around 11 or noon.
Exercise? He gets most of his while performing; that's enough activity for any human. He takes a daily dip in his pool—"just enough to kick my feet; in and out."
Perhaps the most important element in Jimmy's well-being is his avoidance of the usual strains of show business life. "Enemies?" he reflected. "I can't think of any."
It works in reverse too. Durante is the only star of whom I have I never heard an ill word said.
"I don't like to have arguments around me," he continued. "I don't want the writers arguin' with me about things. Ninety per cent of the time I take their word for things. Once in a while I override them. If I'm goin' to get killed, I want to do the killin' myself."
Show business comprises almost his whole life, but he does have one hobby. Fishing. He owns a house on Clear Lake in Northern California and he talked longingly of the days be spent there.
"My wife's folks used to own property up there—that's how I heard about it," he said. "I used to spend three months away from a telephone and everythin'. Then I'd go back and open a night club season.
"I used to row out on the lake all alone and fish for bass. They're my favorite. I think they're the prettiest fish and the smartest. Feller wrote a book once called 'My Friend, the Bass.' I absorbed every word of it.
"I haven't been back there in four years. For one thing, I'm too busy. And it's kinds hard to go back. There are too many memories of the happy times I spent there."

Jimmy Durante was a friend to bass, and I suspect they were a friend to him. The rest of the world was.

Another Catastrastroke

Things happened to Jimmy Durante that never happened to any one else. If anyone else told you the story, you’d swear it was made up, that it was some kind of comedy routine. It wasn’t with Durante.

Here's one from United Press International that appeared in newspapers starting May 31, 1963. Every time I post one of these columns featuring Durante, I can always hear his voice in the quotes. I imagine you do, too. Dem’s da conditions dat prevail! Hot-cha-cha!

Walls Tumbling Down on Durante
By VERNON SCOTT
By UP-International
When Jimmy Durante returned from a recent personal appearance tour he pulled up in front of his home and discovered a catastrastroke.
His old homestead had been leveled to the ground.
"The only thing still standing was the chimney and the swimmin' pool," the Schnozz cried out, obviously still in shock. "You coulda knocked me over with a ton of feathers."
Sure enough, Jimmy's home for more than 30 years in Beverly Hills, had been demolished as thoroughly as Jimmy destroys pianos. "The first thing I do is look up my wife Marge, and I say to her, 'Marge, what's going on here? I turn my back and look what happens! No house!' And Marge tells me she can explain. But I still don't understand the explanation.”
DURANTE stroked his nose, more from affection than out of contemplation. It seemed to give him strength to continue his story. “Before I left town Marge says we need another bedroom in the house for our baby, Cecelia Alicia, who is now two years old. I says 'OK. Knock down a couple walls and add a bedroom.'
"But she got carried away. With the help of some bulldozers my little Marge knocked down every wall in the jernt. She tells me it was impossible to extend to the back door without knocking down the back of the house.
"So I says, 'Why didn't you extend to the front?' And she says, " 'We couldn't extend to the front without knocking down the whole front of the house.'
“It looks like they compromised and pulled down everything just to be sure there was enough space to add another room. "Maybe it's a good thing they tore down the house," Durante sighed.
"After all it was only a three-bedroom place. For a home in Beverly Hills that looks very bad. To tell the truth, I used to hear my neighbors grumble about having a house like that in such a nice community.
"And anyhow, Marge tells me it costs almost as much to repair a house as to build a new one. That's a fact."
The Durante swimming pool will remain intact and unused.
"I never swam in it before, and I ain't gonna swim in it now," he declared. "It's just to look at for prestige. Beverly Hills, you know."
How big will the new house be when it is completed? "I hate to tell you this," Jimmy said, hanging his head. "But it's only got three bedrooms. If you ask me, it's another catastrastroke!"

The Italian Who Couldn't Eat Italian Food

Jimmy Durante used to start off his radio show musically growling “Ya Gotta Start Out Each Day With a Song.” It’s an enthusiastic, optimistic song from an enthusiastic, optimistic guy.

There’s something about listening to Durante that makes you feel good. Other entertainers may not have got away with the happy hoke that poured out during Durante’s act, but he was so genuine and sincere on stage. He amused himself and that amused everyone else.

And there’s something about reading Durante that makes you feel good. Here’s the Associated Press’ Hollywood column that ran in papers starting on May 20, 1961. Durante somehow found himself in unique situations that made a good little story. In reading a bunch of these over the years, it seems pretty much mandatory that any time the press quoted Durante, he was quoted in Durante dialect.

Durante Counts The House(s)
By BOB THOMAS
AP Movie-TV Writer
HOLLYWOOD (AP) -- Has marriage changed Jimmy Durante?
No, I'm happy to report. He is still the same suave, lovable, gregarious self.
“I ain't changed none," he commented over breakfast. "I still do the same t'ings I useta. The only difference now is I got me two houses. Two houses! I must be outa my mind!”
This requires some explaining. When Jimmy married his long-time girlfriend Marge Little last December, he had a house and she had a house. Hers was a spanking modern up in the hills, his was a tile-roof traditional in the heart of Beverly Hills. They still have them: his and hers, each with a swimming pool.
“It's the only t'ing we argue about,” Jimmy lamented. “She don't wanna move outa her place. I can't move all my junk up dere. What am I goin' to do with all the plaques, all the photographs I got? I got no place to put 'em.”
As of this writing, it's a standoff. Every morning, Jimmy leaves the hilltop home for the 10-minute drive to the Beverly Drive house. The maid serves him breakfast and he conducts business from the house. After a day of appointments and rehearsals, he returns to the home on the hill.
“Sometimes I come down here for a shower,” Jimmy related. “That makes Marge mad. 'Why can't you take one here?' she sez. I happen to like the shower in this house. I'm useta it.”

Jimmy was in town briefly before leaving for a date at Harrah's Lake Tahoe. He has been traveling during most of his marriage thus far. He was on a night club tour and went to Italy for a cameo role in an Italian film, “The Last Judgment.”
“Marge went to Italy with me and to New York and Miami,” he said, “but the rest of the time she stays home. What's she gonna do in Cincinnati? And besides, when she's not here, that means we got two houses empty. Ridicalous!”
Jimmy was surprised to find himself recognized wherever he went in Italy—“An I ain't made a fillum in eight-nine years.”
The movie-making was quite an experience.
“I just worked t'ree days in the pitchuh,” he said. “I play a 'guy who goes around sayin' the world's goin' to come to an end.
“The director is this guy (Vittorio) DiSica an' he's great. The only trouble was everybody else was talkin' Italian. So there was a minute wait between when they finished their lines and I realized it was time for mine.”
Jimmy's experience with Italian food put him in the hospital here for a checkup. “The food is great, but I can't make it no more,” he said sadly.
He was breakfasting on a pill, prune juice, boiled eggs, toast and tea. That would suffice until dinner. Marge is a good cook, he said, but she gets little chance to display her ability. His dinner is a small steak or piece of chicken. Corn flakes at bedtime round out his frugal diet.
Despite this, he keeps going at full energy through the day and into the night. Even during breakfast, he answered a succession of phone calls. One of them was from Marge, up on the hill.
“She sez, 'git rid of da house,'” Jimmy reported.

He Got a Million of 'Em

Jimmy Durante’s career was reborn on March 25, 1943. That’s when he teamed for the first time with Garry Moore on radio. The two were an overnight sensation. Durante’s film career, floundering because of lousy comedy roles and the illness then death of his wife, was reborn.

Here’s a syndicated column from later in the year. All columns quoting Durante quoted him in Durante dialect. It’s the only possible way Durante could be quoted; it wouldn’t be Durante otherwise. The photo I’ve added to this story is from when Durante put his nose in cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. It happened on Hallowe’en in 1945.

Hollywood Greets Durante
By FREDERICK C. OTHMAN
Hollywood, Aug. 17—“What’s dis Sinatra got dat I ain’t got?” demanded Jimmy Durante from his perch on high. ‘Nuttin’, says I.”
If as much, says we, after contemplation of such a scene as Hollywood, seldom produces. What Durante had was three of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s beauties, all better than six feet, tall, all showering him with kisses and all holding him aloft, the better to see the famous schnozzle.
The Misses Dorothy Ford. Bunny Waters and Helen O'Hara were provided by the studio to welcome an incoming notable. Durante had read about the hoopla surrounding the arrival of crooner Frankie Sinatra; what he said he wanted was a bigger and better reception. He got it. Come to think of it, he deserved it.
Metro is going to star Jimmy first, in “Two Sisters and a Sailor.” Then he joins Fred Astaire in “Ziegfeld Follies.”
“Wit me hair piece,” said Jimmy. “De’re makin’ me anudder to cover up me bald spot; to make me a glammer man.”
Durante, who’s been moidering the king’s English for two decades, said his radio program—first he ever had—is an interesting job. He meets so many interesting people.
“Take de writers,” he said. “Crazy men. Dey give you ulsters, just listenin’ to ‘em.”
The team of Clayton, Jackson and Durante first began business in a speakeasy over a New York garage in 1923.
“A foist class jernt,” said Jimmy. “No winders, no nuttin’ but a cover charge. It was one of dem places dat catered to de Wall St. trade. Open from midnight until 10 o’clock de next a.m. So de brokers, dey’d come by for breakfast. Five dollars for a plate of eggs, $10 for what dey called champagne. A fine business, but hard on de tonsils.”
Durante gradually emerged as the star of the trio; Clayton became his manager and Jackson his handy man.
One more anecdote concerning the schnozzle:
“I was down at dis Walter Reed Horsepital (says Jimmy) going aroun’, playin’ de accordeen for de boys. One of de lads was just out from unner de ether an’ he looks at me and says do I make me nose of putty? No, says I. Let me feel it, says he. So he feels de ol’ schnozzola an’ he goes back to sleep wit a big smile on de kisser. Makes me feel very sendimendal, like.”

He Put the Rant in Durante

There are two things you’ll notice in any newspaper interview with Jimmy Durante—all the quotes are in Durante dialect, and he launches into a monologue that sounds just like one of his acts.

Here’s a good example from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 30, 1940. You can probably hear Durante’s voice as you read this. By the way, the Schnozz was born on today’s date in 1893.

CANDID CLOSE-UPS
Jimmy Durante Discovers Acting Preferable to Sleuthing; Decides to Stick To ‘Keep Off the Grass’
By ROBERT FRANCIS
"I got nothin’ to say," announced Jimmy Durante, eyeing us severely in his dressing room at the Broadhurst. "You newspaper guys made me enough trouble already."
We never take a statement like that from the Durante seriously. He always has plenty to say. And usually gets in the last word.
"Everybody should mind his own business," he went on. "A butcher should cut meat, a banker should cut coupons, an’..."
"And you should stick to cutting capers in "Keep Off the Grass," we suggested.
"Ha," he snorted, indignantly, "everybody wants to get in the act! Stand back! I make the gags!"
"Listen, I read in the papers all about this ‘Fifth Column.’ Somethings got to be done! ‘Jimmy,’ I says, ‘we organize a Gessepo of our own.’ ‘How do I start?’ I asks me.
"I goes into the Astor Bar for a buttermilk. I greets a guy next to me. ‘How dy ye do, Mr. Durante?’ he cracks. Right away I am auspicious. I ask him to cash my check. He does. I am more suspicious.
"He tells me he is a baker. ‘Do you own a car?’ I queries. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘an I got a chauffer, too.’ What effrontery! Now I knows I’m on the scent! Like a dog after a frankfurter!
"I slips out and phones the F. B. I. This is too big to handle alone. They investigates, shadows, wire-taps. What a catastrophe! They discovers he is a Harvard man with money left him!
"So he sues me in Supreme Court for inflamation of character! I tries to camouflage the details, but the judge has a congested mind. He fines me a hundred dollars. Politics! I considers taking it to the Epaulet Division, but I thinks the matter has gone far enough!"
The ever-present Durante cigar stump twisted furiously.
"You’d think that learnt me a lesson, but last week I tries again. Gluttony! I see a suspicious character in . . . (this is for the ‘Eagle,’ ain't it?) . . . in Brooklyn. I trails him through the Park Slope, through Flatbush, into Bay Ridge. What a sleut! He ducks into a house, an’ I waits diligently. I holds my breath an’ watches for him to come out. He don’t. I am breathless.
"All of a sudden a big guy is next to me. We discovers each other siniustaniously! He is a cop. I have claustrophobia! ‘What are you doin’ here?' he barks ominiously. ‘I’m on a suspicious case,’ I ups to him, bold. '‘You look suspicious to me,’ he comes back, frisking me, ‘an’ wearin’ a disguise, eh?’ An’ before I knows it, he grabs me by the schnozzle an’ yanks. The ignominy of it!
"So I’m in court again. I explains to the judge I’m an actor. “Why don’t you work at it?’ he says. ‘I do work at it,’ I replies, ‘Right now I'm in ‘Keep Off the Grass’ at the Broadhurst Theater, New York City.’ ‘Then I fine you ten dollars,’ he retorts, ‘for being nosey an’ not stayin’ where you belong.’ The brutality of it! Durante fined ten bucks for nosetalgia!"
Il Schnozzola waggled his bare toes which were getting an alcohol rub from Tiny, that 200-pound fixture of the Durante menage.
"You guys are responsible for it all," he sighed, plaintively. "You write all that stuff in the papers about ‘boring from within’ and ‘fronts.’ It gets a guy like me all steamed up. I can’t knit, but I wants to do somethin’. But from now on I leaves sleuthin’ to the sleuts. The butcher should cut meat, and the banker. . . ."
"We know, Jimmy," we interrupted, firmly, "and you should stay on 44th St. where you belong. However, there isn't a word of truth in any of this." The Durante grin appeared around the stub of the cigar.
"Well," he drawled, "it might make a good song lyric, at that. And anyway, I told you I had nothin’ to say. You guys have made me trouble enough already."
In any event, that fictitious magistrate may have been gifted with second sight, for "Keep Off the Grass" takes a Summer vacation, begun last night and lasting until mid-August. Jimmy goes to the Coast to make a picture in the interim. He can practice his "sleuthing" for the next six weeks in Hollywood.

From all of here at the Tralfaz blog, here’s a cheery holiday song from one of the greats of show biz.

A Calabash Explanation

It is impossible to dislike Jimmy Durante.

Durante’s act was, at times, corny and old-fashioned, but it was easy to ignore that. He was having such a good time entertaining that you’d just get caught up in his enthusiasm. And even though he made fun of his nose and vocabulary, he never appeared self-centered.

Dick Kleiner of the National Enterprise Association profiled him in one of his five “funnymen” features in 1950. This column appeared in papers on February 25th. Incidentally, this is one of the few columns I’ve seen where Durante isn’t coy when talking about the identity of Mrs. Calabash.

Carryin's On
Jimmy Durante Loves 'em And so Does His Public
By RICHARD KLEINER
New York—(NEA)—Jimmy Durante is no babe in arms any more. He has to wear glasses when he reads and his hair is so sparse that when he combs it in the morning he has to decide whether the two of them want to be combed east or west. But time has dulled neither his wit nor his vocabulary nor his nose. All three are just as sharp as ever, particularly the schnoz. The great feature of Durante's humor, it dominates his life as it does his face.
Jimmy was posing for a publicity picture in his hotel room here. Always obliging, he had agreed to aid a charity campaign. The idea was to have a close-up of the charity's seal, affixed jauntily to the Durante schnoz.
But the photographer put the seal on the wrong way.
"Wait a minute, Jimmy," said the photographer, "well have to turn it upside down."
"What," said Durante, mortified, "turn de nose upside down? Den people will smell me!"
NOT A WEEK goes by but what the Durante radio show contains at least one reference to the nose. Something like this:
Durante calls the hotel room service and orders a dozen roses, pink lace curtains and the room sprayed with perfume. Asked for an explanation, Durante says:
"The hotel made my nose and I register as man and wife so I thought I'd make it look like a honeymoon suite."
Besides his radio appearances, Jimmy is in constant demand as a night club performer. He thoroughly enjoys himself in his act, because he likes to perform to a live audience.
"Ya know he says, "dere's all de difference in de woild between de oily shows and de free o'clock "show. De free o'clock show is like a party at somebody's house. Everybody's happy — not drunk, but just happy.
"But de dinner-time shows is tough. Dat crowd ya gotta go get—you just gotta go out and get 'em. Ya gotta make friends wit 'em.
"And sometimes dey don't laugh, dey just don't laugh. Den de trapdoor opens and you fall t'rough de floor."
* * *

THAT the trapdoor hasn't opened very often for James Durante is proven by his long, successful career in show business. Now 56, (or possibly a few years older), he was born in New York and grew up helping his father run his barber shop.
But, at 17, he was pounding a piano in a Coney Island night spot and a year later he was accompanying a singing waiter named Eddie Cantor.
In 1923, he teamed up with singer Eddie Jackson and dancer Lou Clayton, and Clayton, Jackson and Durante became one of Broadway's brightest teams. Durante turned down solo offers until the depression flattened show business, then went to Hollywood.
Clayton and Jackson are still with him, the former acting as his business manager and the latter helping with his routines.
The rest is history.
By now, Jimmy is one of the most popular guys in the business, with fellow performers as well as with the laughing public. On his annual visits to New York, his hotel suite is a madhouse. Jimmy holds court in the living room, eating his breakfast about three in the afternoon.
Drinking prune juice (out of a glass especially constructed to accommodate the proboscis) and eating two raw eggs, he explains:
"I been eatin' rore eggs for breakfast for years but I don't know why."
* * *
FOUR WRITERS work on the Durante radio show, with Durante usually in on story conferences "to help kick t'ings around." They usually manage to include a fine assortment of multi-syllable words for Durante to mangle. In one script, here were some of the ones he had to read:
Mispreaprehension, punkrutude, plutonic, sprouse, catastroscope, statnatory.
Those, of course, were designed to be Durante-ized, but there were many others that just sort of fell into the trap, unpremedicatated.
As every Durante fan knows, he closes each show with a reference to "Mrs. Calabash," usually saying, "Good-night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are."
"It was about ten years ago," says Jimmy. "I was in Chicago, between trains. I runs into Mrs. Calabash who was a school friend of mine back here in New York. Mrs. Calabash was her married name. We had a fine time talking about de old days.
"About four years ago, I just fought she'd get a kick out of it if I mentioned her name on de air. So I said 'Good-night, Mrs. Calabash.'
"But I never heard from her, although I got letters from all the wrong Mrs. Calabashes. So I added dat 'wherever you are' because I don't know wherever she is."
Wherever she is, she probably does get a big kick out of Durante. She and millions of others.

Mr. Morfit Becomes a Star

Garry Moore can owe much of his success to three things—his own talent, a sponsor that could pull network strings and an unlikely teaming with ol’ Schnozzola.

Moore had been kicking around NBC day-time radio in the early ‘40s when his agents landed him a guest spot on the “Camel Comedy Caravan” on Friday March 5, 1943. Camel and its agency, William Esty, were delighted and wanted Moore back the following week, and even talked about building a show around him because of the dearth of young comedians. The problem—the “Caravan” was on CBS and Moore was under contract to NBC. Well, it was no problem. Camel sponsored another show, one on Thursday nights on NBC starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Costello got sick. Abbott asked to be let out of his contract until his partner was well. So Camel worked out a deal reported to be worth $1,500 to play a game of musical chairs. Moore was handed the Abbott and Costello NBC Thursday time slot but Camel moved some of the people from the CBS “Caravan” to his show, including Georgia Gibbs, Xavier Cugat and newcomer Jimmy Durante. It debuted March 25th.

All the talk on Radio Row that this was Moore’s show ended quickly. Moore and Durante clicked as a team. Who would have thought it? Durante had previously worked with noisy vaudevillians but Moore’s humour involved wordplay and semi-surreal stories. But the differences complemented each other and listeners could sense a genuinely friendly relationship between the two; there was no person more genuine on the radio than Durante. Moore’s star rose quickly and though he had a lengthy career in radio and TV, he was never better than when he worked with Durante. And Durante remained loveable until the day he died but he never had a better radio cohort than Moore.

Here’s an Associated Press story published a month after the Durante-Moore show went on the air.

Garry Moore’s Tomfoolery Clicks On Night Radio Show
By JEAN MEEGAN
NEW YORK, Apr. 25—(AP)—Until this month Garry Moore’s tomfoolery wasn’t known to anyone who doesn’t listen to the radio before lunch. He joined the aristocracy of radio comedians—those who don’t appear until after dinner—unexpectedly when the Abbott-Costello program was canceled because of Lou Costello’s illness.
But before any radio audience grinned at Moore’s gags (and his are the kind you grin at) he was the class show off. While we were being very serious about comedy, he flashed a fan letter before me and said: “This is what I mean.”
Over my shoulder: “I am under the impression that you are Garry Morfit of Baltimore and at one time went to Baltimore City college. If you are, this is a line of congratulations and best wishes from a former teacher of yours.
“I used to enjoy the ‘programs’ you put on during English history in room 210. When I gave up trying to be tough about your interruptions I laughed too.”
High praise. A comedian has no better friends than they who laugh at his jokes.
Hardworking by nature and training, Moore is quietly authoritative through practise. At 27 he looks like a collar ad with a crew haircut and Princeton length trousers.
His ascent to night-time commercial radio was steady, a little slow but sure—seven years in all. He could be a control engineer, a station manager, or a director with the same facility that he is master of ceremonies. He has done everything in radio, even to sweeping out the studio after everyone has gone home.
His apprenticeship included continuity writing at station WBAL in Baltimore (this period immediately followed his collaboration with F. Scott Fitzgerald on a play that has yet to see the light of day). He went to St. Louis as special events announcer, eased into a variety show, and glided from there into Chicago to the already established “Club Matinee.”
Moore not only pulled the jokes on “Club Matinee,” he made them up. He did the same for “Anything Goes.” As ring leader of that morning show, he became H.V. Kaltenborn’s office mate, and sensing the comical possibilities of this quartering, practiced a telephone imitation of Kaltenborn until it became a pretty good piece of mimicry that he uses to this day.
Because of his flair for mimicry, Moore doesn’t listen to other comedians on the air. He’s afraid he might pick up their idiosyncrasies. All week long he works at his home in Larchmont on his material for the Thursday night broadcast. He doesn’t have a gag writer.
“I like whimsical comedy,” he explains, “punched up with gags, pseudo-serious stuff. I don’t there is any sin in wasting a few words to make a show warm and human. Most of the night-time shows are too fast-paced, they are hysterically trying each to outpunch each other.”
Moore is fervent, too about the way he gets his laughs. The easy way at the moment is to mention a butcher, horse, shoes—he tries to steer clear of these pat provokers. He’d like to try “a ‘clambake show’ on the order of “Anything Goes” after the other comedy shows were finished for the night. I think it would be a sensation.”
His present Thursday night show includes Jimmy Durante and Xavier Cugat and is not on anything like a permanent basis. That’s because the army may require Mr. Moore for a bit of business overseas. But, says Garry, “the army can take me anytime at all now. Just as long as I have hit the mark in night-time radio, it will be easier to return.”

Moore never did end up in the service, though his draft status kept him out of the running of a job hosting “Truth or Consequences” in March 1944 (Ransom Sherman and Harry Von Zell made it to the audition stage). He did end up at the Roxy in New York at the same time for $3,500 a week.

It’s interesting Moore wanted to try something like the earlier versions of “The Tonight Show.” Moore hosted a somewhat quirky daytime show in television in the ‘50s that might have translated into an interesting late-night programme. But I’d still rather watch him work with Durante.

The Big W

It may not be the greatest comedy of all time, but “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (1963) may be one of the most fun, thanks to the hammy cast. A great cast it is, too, full of wonderful movie, radio and TV veterans who somehow were crammed into one film. Plus, how can you dislike a movie where Milton Berle continually gets bashed with Ethel Merman’s handbag?

And who better to steal the opening scene than Jimmy Durante? Here’s a full version of a column that appeared in papers of July 1962, a full year before the film was released, about his role in the epic comic adventure. The photo is courtesy of NEA and was sent to paper with the column.

Film Has Slapstick . . . With Message Yet?
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
Hollywood Correspondent
Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
PALM SPRINGS, Calif., July 7 (NEA) It was as gooey and as slick as the custard in one of Mack Sennett's old throwing pies. It was slapstick but it had, substance — there was a message under the meringue.
Stanley Kramer of Movie Messages Unlimited was delivering it under the title, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." With a $6 million budget and a 133-day shooting schedule he had Mads to spare.
With the message came a pie in the face with a banana peel on the sidewalk. With the largest cast of comedians ever assembled in a film, it was greed — with laughs.
Greed consumes the good, the decent and the noble but it is funny, funny, funny, funny.
It was also "The Treasure of Sierra Madre" with laughs — with Sid Caesar turning a hardware store into a shambles, Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett beserk in an airplane, Jimmy Durante as a bank robber, Ethel Merman as Milton Berle's heckling mother-in-law.
The cast sounded like a meeting of the Screen Actors Guild.
There was Spencer Tracy as a police captain plus all the others — Jonathan Winters. Edie Adams, Dorothy Provine, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Eddie (Rochester) Anderson, Jim Backus, Peter Falk, Paul Ford, Barbara Keller, Arnold Stang, Alan Carney.
Kramer's films (Judgment at Nuremberg, The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, etc.) had delivered more messages than Western Union but this time he had promised "Something a little less serious."
The greed message would be abridged, on a slapstick, in a mad, hilarious chase for buried treasure. Audiences could laugh all the way to the fadeout as the funny men of movies and television became engaged to calamity and then wed to disaster.
As Kramer directed early scenes here for the film with Caesar, Berle, Merman, Rooney, Hackett, Edie Adams, Dorothy Provine and Winters, the stars became more and more aware of another message.
It was the message that Kramer is an uncompromising perfectionist.
After a long Saturday of rehearsing and filming parts of a scene involving, all of them 115-degree temperature on a desert highway, he announced to his film editor:
"Don't print anything we shot today. We'll start fresh, from the top, Monday morning." It was throwing $20,000 (the daily cost) to the desert winds but he said the words with cool patience.
It was a long scene with complicated, argumentative dialog about how the $350,000 treasure, if found, would be split between them. In a way, it sounded like a meeting of Mickey Rooney's creditors, with confused Mickey telling Sid Caesar at one point:
"Sure, I know, you'd rather have one fourth than two-eighths."
Between rehearsals. Buddy Hackett chuckled to us: "I'm going to hire Mickey as my accountant."
For eight hours in the heat they rehearsed, became confused, became unconfused and blew their lines. But all the sweat left nothing on film as Kramer blew the whistle.
Jimmy Durante finally landed in front of a camera for that actor's delight — a big emotional death scene. It wasn't "Camille" but it was true to the code of Laugh Week. Jimmy had the last laugh even after his last breath.
He kicked the bucket both emotionally and literally.
Five top comedians, what's more, had to stand by, frozen-faced and without a line of dialog, while The Nose and the bucket shared the camera lens.
Casting Jimmy as Smiler Grogan, a bank robber whose death in an auto-gone-over-a-cliff triggers a mad rush to find $350,000 in buried cash, was offbeat enough for "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World."
But Jimmy kicking that rusty old bucket as his leg stiffens in death was an obstreperous clue to the reason for all the "Mad's" in the title of Stanley Kramer's $6 million comedy.
It was funny, funny, funny, funny.
The bucket as kicked by Jimmy in the William and Tania Rose script started clanking down the rocky mountainside with the camera following it all the way. Down and down and around it went, prodded now and then by special effects in some outlandish gyrations.
Jimmy even had time to get up from his "death bed," dust himself off and watch the old bucket clatter until it was out of sight.
"Now dere," said Jimmy, "is a death scene.'
The witnesses to his death and the bucket caper were Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Mickey Rooney and Jonathan Winters. But they didn't laugh, anv of them, until Jimmy grinned:
"Yes, sir, how about dat. Who needs one of them method dramamine coaches."
How Jimmy's speeding automobile landed him in its twisted wreckage as a highway statistic for the film was something new for the screen, too. There was a day when a movie stunt man would have been lined to drive a car at top speed, then leap from the wheel at the cliff's edge like Jimmy Dean did in that game of "chicken."
But the guided missile age, has come to movie cars-over-the-cliff, too. The spectacular crash, at 60 miles an hour, was radio-controlled with a dummy at the wheel and a camera in the car's back seat. The camera w«s encased in a shatterproof sphere, like those installed in airplanes for after-crash instrument readings.
Four other cameras at various angles caught the car's plunge off the highway for what will be the opening scene in the film. No penny saver, producer-director Kramer filmed the sequence four times with four autos purchased at a used car lot.
The radio-electronic system worked so well that only one of the cars missed its "landing" mark, end then by only a few feet from a starting line 550 yards from the cliff's edge.
It's a short, short, short, short World, too: Contact lenses come as sun glasses, you know, and Edie Adams was wearing green ones for her hours in the sun on location here . . .
Irving Berlin paged Ethel Merman for his new Broadway musical, "Mr. President," but at the time she was planning a European tour in "Gypsy." "So," says Ethel, a bit sadly, "he rewrote the show and then my tour was canceled."

I'm Flabbergasketed

Hollywood made a couple of movies about Al Jolson and one about Eddie Cantor. It’s a shame it didn’t do the same thing with Jimmy Durante.

Jimmy’s life had enough drama and atmosphere to make a good film (especially with a little dramatic embellishment). So it’s a shame that some studio didn’t work out a deal when it had the chance. Durante’s biography was written in 1949 by one of W.C. Fields’ drinking buddies, Gene Fowler, and United Press columnist Virginia MacPherson learned an option on it was being pursued in Tinseltown. She talked with Durante about it. A couple of things about her column are interesting. One is that she, like everyone else it seems, wrote Durante’s quotes in his dialect. The other is that Durante didn’t get a cent from the sale of any books. Fowler got it all. That just doesn’t seem quite fair. Dem’s da conditions dat prevail, I guess.

MacPherson obliquely refers to the fact that Larry Parks played Jolson on the screen because Jolson was too old. The immortal Keefe Brasselle was Cantor for the same reason. But she’s right. Who else could play Durante but Durante?

The column is from 1949.

‘Flabbergasketed’ Jimmy Watches ‘Schnozz’ Sales
By Virginia MacPherson
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 23. (U.P.)—Jimmy Durante whose life story “Schnozola” has hit the best seller lists already, says he’s “flabbergasketed” anybody’d shell out three bucks to read about him.
“I really am,” rasped the little guy with the big beak. “An’ dat’s a fack. It’s sold more ‘n 50,000 awreddy . . . Imagine! All does people gittin’ on de inside o’Durante.
“I’LL BE ENTERTAINING at the Greater Los Angeles Press club. Maybe I oughta take a few copies down ‘n peddle ‘em, huh?”
Jimmy doesn't get a penny of the proceeds from all this—those go to author Gene Fowler and the publishing firm.
“But what I’m gittin’ outa dis, honey,” he twinkled, “couldn’t be bought wit money.”
DURANTE SPENT months “spillin’ my heart out” to Fowler, who lolled in an easy chair, turned on a wire recorder, asked a question now and then, and just listened happily while the “Schnozz” spun his yarns of the old days in show business.
“I didn't have any idea what he was gonna put in," Jimmy added. “To tell de troot, I t’ink he left out a lotta good stuff.
“AND I DON’T like the pitchas he put in. A lotta dem are just gags. Day don’t belong in a book like dat. But what the heck . . . It’s a helluva good writing job.
“I’ve read it free times myself awreddy. And dere’s parts of it dat jist make me cry. Jeez, it sure brings back the memories . . . it sure does.”
IT’S PROBABLY gonna bring him a lot more ‘n that. MGM, 20th-Century-Fox and Paramount studios are scrambling for the rights to put it on the screen.
"Dis story’s gotta be told,” Jimmy nodded. “Not on accounta Durante. Heck, dere’s more about Lou Clayton in it dan there is about me.
“But it’s a nice story about me and my Missus and Eddie Jackson and Clayton... all the people who've been wit’ me fer years. It’s a kinda family story. Make a good pitcha, I betcha.”
THE MASTERMINDS are already looking around for a young feller to play Durante’s part. At which point MacPherson, the No. 1 Durante fan in these parts, will register an official complaint.
All the “Schnozz” needs to look 20 years younger is a little hair. What he’s got left is white and kind of wispy. But Mac Factor’s wig experts could remedy that in two shakes.
HE WAS NO BEAUTY when he was 16 and he’s no beauty now. But the same old gleam is still here.
“Da’s ‘cause I’m still havin’ fun,” Jimmy says modestly.
“And I’ve kept me shapely figger. No bulges around Durante’s diagram.”
No sir, the idea of anybody else playing Durante is something we don’t even like to think about. It’d be nothing short of heresy.