Herald and news., June 29, 1958, Page 24, Image 24

by Joseph N. Bell
On a march night in 1943, a wildly cheering
standing-room-only crowd at New York
City's Copacabana greeted a plaintive little
man wearing a smashed hat, a lecherous leer, and
a magnificent nose. Behind him, a second enter
tainer, clad impeccably in top hat and tails, cake
walked into the spotlight. Then, unexpectedly,
from the shadows of a ringside table, a lithe form
hurdled a chair, slid gracefully across the floor,
and bounced to his feet.
The first two men looked at the third in startled
wonderment, then ecstatic joy. The fabled team of
Durante, Clayton, and Jackson was reunited. They
hadn't appeared together for 12 years, and they
never would again. This night was one of the great
dramatic moments in show business.
If Jimmy Durante had to single out a few high
lights of his remarkable career, this would be one
of them. For Lou Clayton along with Jimmy's
wife, Jeanne, and his father, Bartolomeo was a
great driving force in his life. All three are gone
now, but Jimmy, the greatest clown of our time,
appears indestructible. He has been a headliner in
every aspect of show business vaudeville, night
clubs, radio, television, motion pictures, and rec
ords for almost 40 years. And he has been a
headliner as a gentle, generous, thoroughly good
guy for much longer.
Jimmy's philosophy of life is simple and to the
point: "There are more good people than bad ones
in the world." An associate once said of Jimmy:
"The only thing about him bigger than his nose is
his heart." There are few dissenting votes to this
summation of Durante. Jimmy has constantly
looked for the good in his fellow men.
Practically everything about Durante is fabulous,
from his age (he admits to 65, but some of his
friends think he is older) to his peculiar eating
habits (an affinity for hot water, cornflakes, and
powdered milk) to his steadfast loyalty to friends.
His insistence that Eddie Jackson and other long
time pals share in his success is well known.
Less well known are the dozens of times each
year Jimmy goes out of his way to help an ac
quaintance or a total stranger. When he was in
New York recently for a television show, he got
up with the commuters, subwayed to Brooklyn,
and shook hands with customers of an old friend
who was opening an appliance store. It took 30
cops to hold back the crowd. But as Jimmy pointed
out with his unshakable logic: "A friend in need
is a friend in need."
Durante is living proof that a youngster raised
with good judgment in a God-fearing family will
seldom go wrong, regardless of temptations. Jimmy
was spawned in a rugged Bronx neighborhood, but
his parents were never in want, even though
Bartolomeo, a fine barber, cut his neighbors' hair
for nothing as often as he charged for it.
The Durantes wanted Jimmy to be a musician,
and they gave him piano lessons when he reached
the eighth grade. But instead of the classical music
his parents preferred, Jimmy took to ragtime. He
was good at it, and he landed a job in a Coney
Island saloon when he was in his mid-teens
playing all night, every night, for $25 a week.
Jimmy was exposed to a constant procession of
drunks, streetwalkers, and hoodlums. Yet the only
A LIVING LEGEND:
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part of it that ever rubbed off on him was his
accent and a deep understanding and compassion
for all sorts of people. He has alwavs been a
virtual teetotaler, and to this day he looks upon
all women as great ladies. Jimmy is impulsively
generous yet so self-effacing that he wouldn't ask
the simplest favor of someone he had befriended-
Maybe these are the things that make Jimmy s
friends love him. After he had graduated from
Coney Island to the Harlem night clubs, Jimmy
met a young singer named Maud Jeanne Olson
who applied to him for a job when he was playing
piano and directing an outfit known as "Jimmy
Durante's New Orleans Jazz Band." Jeanne Olson
got the job and a year later she got Jimmy.
At about the same time, Eddie Jackson tried
For almost 40 years, he's been a top
i
out for Jim's show with a vaudeville partner.
The team didn t make the grade, but Jackson
stayed to become Durante's lifelong companion.
Several years later Lou Clayton, an established
soft-shoe dancer, joined the team. "Took it over '
would be a more accurate term.
Clayton recognized the genius in the gravel
voiced Durante, and neither Clayton nor Jackson
got in Jimmy's way, years later, when offers came
for Durante to do a single. But throughout the
Prohibition period, Durante, Clayton, and Jackson
operated a spot in New York known as the Club
Durant, where they supplied the entertainment.
Clayton took Jimmy away from the piano and
put him on the floor as a comedian. The team did
a combination song, dance, and patter act that
: j
in every branch of show business, and
defies description but will never be forgotten by
those who were privileged to see it. The Club
Durant was packed every night with an audience
ranging from socialites to the most vicious gang
sters of that stormy period. Clayton, a tough cus
tomer himself, maintained the peace. Patrons had
to check their firearms before entering, and con
sequently there never was a shooting in the club.
But there was just about everything else.
Twice, soft-hearted Durante was fast-talked
into letting in visitors who claimed to be child
hood friends. On both occasions, they turned out
to be Prohibition agents who closed the club. But
no matter how many times Jimmy was fooled, he
was always fair game the next time.
Clayton once said wonderingly: "God gave Jim
my Durante his great talent. A thousand Lou
Claytons could never have put that talent into this
man. But I loved him and I knew then, as I know
now, that he was a true genius in his own way."
Broadway and motion pictures next beckoned
to Durante and his partners, and shortly after their
stage debut in Florenz Ziegfeld's "Show Girl"
(with Ruby Keelcr and Duke Ellington), they
were signed by Paramount Pictures.
The trio's first break-up came in the early '30s.
' Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered Jimmy a
five-year contract alone. Jeanne Durante
was overjoyed, Jimmy heartbroken. He went only
on condition that Jackson and Clayton go along.
Clayton stayed with Durante as his manager
through the next decade of making mediocre to
bad movies; Jackson finally drifted away after a
few years to try show business on his own.
During this period, Jimmy conquered radio, too.
Although he was making a great deal of money,
he couldn't hang onto it. He insisted on paying
Clayton a third of his income; his staff and taxes
took large bites; and the rest he distributed with
typical Durante openhandedness. He was a sucker
for every hardluck story, but the fact that he was
being taken never bothered Jimmy.
"I only wish," he said many times, "that I was
Rockinfellow."
In 1940, the world turned topsy-turvy for Jim
my Durante. Within two years, he lost his brother,
his father, and his wife. Jeanne died after a pro
longed illness, and Jimmy worked little during this
time. He lost interest in everything.
Youthful Jimmy Durante in his Harlem days with
his original jazz band (above), and cutting a
caper with two other great favorites, friends
George M. Cohan and Claudette Colbert (right).
it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
But several months after Jeanne's death, Jimmy
heard through the Ritz Brothers that Eddie Jack
son was holed up in Akron, O., running a third
rate night club, divorced, from his wife, and
desperately unhappy. Jimmy sent for Jackson, and
Clayton prevailed on the two of them to go back
to work at the Copacabana in New York. That's
where Clayton joined them for one night, in the
final appearance of Durante, Clayton, and Jackson.
Meantime, Hollywood had forgotten Jimmy, and
there were long periods of idleness when he re
turned to the West Coast. In desperation, he even
took a part in a Gene Autry movie where he had
to be lashed to the horse to stay aboard.
"I'd never rode a horse," Jimmy recalls, "and
the horse never had been rode. So we both started
out on even terms. It was a catastrastroke."
Jimmy's final triumph and one of his greatest
losses came almost simultaneously. In his last ill
ness, Lou Clayton arranged the beginnings of
Jimmy's television career. He never lived to see
the resurgence of Jimmy in this new medium that
projected the Durante warmth to a whole new
generation of Americans.
Today, Jimmy is as busy as he wants to be, but
he is also lonely. He craves companion
ship, and four men surround him constantly:
his manager, Lou Cohen, pianist Jules Buffano,
drummer Jack Roth, and Eddie Jackson. All have
been associated with Jimmy through most of his
entertainment life. Scarcely an evening goes by
that these four aren't hanging out at Durante's
modest eight-room house in Beverly Hills, which
is distinguished mainly by the plaques, awards, and
other mementos of a lifetime in show business.
Unless some dire emergency such as working
dictates otherwise, Jimmy arises about noon. He
calls anything earlier a "predickalous hour." Once
he's up and going, though, he operates in a whirl
wind of feverish activity.
One of Jimmy's few concessions to Hollywood
living is a swimming pool which he uses with the
same gusto he displays in everything else he does
looking in a bathing suit something like Mahatma
Gandhi on a cigar-smoking binge. Jimmy also en
joys fishing, horse racing, reading, and song writ
ing when he gets around to them, which isn't often.
He's a terrible eater and has been concerned about
his waistline for so long that he just nibbles on a
weird assortment of nonfattening foods.
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Jimmy's wife, Jeanne, who first came to him as a
young singer, was a driving force in his career.
His losing battle with the English language is no
phony. Since Jimmy's early Bronx and Coney
Island days, when his associates talked out of the
sides of their mouths, his English has been a
curious mixture of lower East Side, Mrs. Mala
propisms, and an elegant vocabulary. His fascina
tion with big words without knowing how to
handle them has resulted in such Durante classics
as "financial typhoon," "exterior motive," "stupen
dous," "catastrastroke," and hundreds of others.
Jimmy, who seldom hides anything from any
body, has managed to preserve one secret over
the years: the identity of the "Mrs. Calabash" to
whom he says good night at the end of each of
his radio and TV shows. This started back in the
early '40s, and has since become a ritual. Jimmy
was quite disturbed on several occasions when
his shows ran long and he was cut off before he
could say good night to Mrs. Calabash. No one
not even Lou Clayton, who was closest to him
could discover the origin of the remark. Ques
tioned about it today, Jimmy just looks skyward
and says, "A guy's gotta have some secrets."
Currently working under a contract with NBC
which has five more years to run, Jimmy probably
will be back on television with a weekly half-hour
show next Fall, although the deal hasn't been
closed yet. In the meantime, he plays a few choice
night clubs and appears as a TV guest star.
Jimmy has regained, and probably will never
again lose, his place as America's most beloved
clown. If he wears his mantle carelessly today, he
has earned the privilege after almost a half-century
in show business. And millions of Americans are
hoping that Mrs. Calnbash, whoever she is, won't
be saying good night to Jimmy Durante for a long
time to come.
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FmnilV Weekly, June 29, 195J
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