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PART EIGHTEEN WITH SADIE AT SARDI’S  Inside the famed Sardi's Restaurant on Times Square in present-day New York City. Note the famous gallery of celebrity caricatures on the wall in the background. |
Lots of humdrum relatives
and then came...Sadie
of TheColumnists.com
On the “Discovering America” trip my father and I took by train to Virginia Beach and back in 1953, we got off in Chicago to see a Cubs-Phillies game. All other sites there I’ve forgotten.
We then traveled to Peoria, his hometown, to visit his boyhood pal, Louis Fleischer, in whose liquor store backroom I waited while he and my dad laughed out in front. I’d never met any of my father’s old chums, which gave him a new reality other than being my dad. He had a past, a boyhood, as I did. He had once been me.
From Peoria we ventured to Springfield, to visit Lincoln’s home and grave. My dad, I learned on this trip, was intensely American. Beyond patriotism or nationalism, he just loved the country, something I inherited from him--maybe on this trip, one of whose destinations was Colonial Williamburg, Virginia; America has always fascinated me more than Europe or anywhere else. My dad never traveled outside the United States.
After Springfield, we went to Lansing, Michigan, to visit my father’s sister, my Aunt Mary and Uncle Lawrence and first cousins Larry, Lewis and Lee. This all remains a massive gap in my memory of our trip. We next traveled to Detroit to meet my very rich great Aunt Julia, who showed up in a chauffeur-driven car, wearing a spooky black veil and smelling of powder. That made for a dreary afternoon. I was more interested in talking to her black chauffeur than in Aunt Julia’s stories of life with Uncle Dolph (changed in the war from “Adolf”). Family stories never failed to bore me. Most of my father’s aunts, uncles and cousins I first met on this trip I never needed to see again
At long last, we headed for New York City, the place I most wanted to see, home of still more distant cousins, Bob and Sadie, much talked about in our family because of their wealth and New York connections. Bob ran a Cadillac agency in Jamaica, Long Island, and Sadie operated a Fifth Avenue fur salon, Corbo Furriers. It would’ve been hard to locate a more posh or representative capitalistic couple in all New York City.
They seemed definitive New Yorkers. Sadie was a short squat lady with a commanding presence and a wheezing voice (every sentence ended with her gulping for air). She spoke in the broadest accent I’d ever heard, a parody of a New York accent. She and Bob, a tall, square-shaped man with the pinkest face and whitest hair I’d seen, had a driver, dined in fancy restaurants and, most impressive to me, were on first-name terms with Vincent Sardi, the founder of a famous Broadway restaurant I had heard all about. Through Sardi, she could get tickets to any hit show with a quick phone call.
Sadie was incredibly generous, forever bestowing gifts on guests for any and all occasions. Whenever we went to their Great Neck, L.I., estate for dinner, there would be a little package on our plates. Their home was equipped with a virtually unused swimming pool, a vast lawn in back, a cook and chauffeur. I accepted their gifts with fumbling thanks. Maybe money was Bob and Sadie’s way of showing affection, the New York coin of the realm, or possibly their way of garnering appreciation and respect.
Sadie, short and buxom, waddled but she did so with great authority, barking orders in her raspy voice over the phone, to her saleswoman and to husband Bob, a big lug with a booming voice who made crude wisecracks but obeyed Sadie’s every command. Childless, she liked throwing money around and did all she could to make our visit not merely pleasant but unforgettable, and she succeeded.
She boasted that she had worked her way up in the garment industry in classic fashion, starting at 16 sewing linings into fur coats. At 18, she took charge of her division and owned her own shop at 30, which she bought herself. I later learned that Corbo Furriers was a chic salon frequented by celebrities. I wish I’d bothered to know her better, but she overwhelmed me with her husky bark. Once, Sadie casually mentioned she had known some members of the Algonquin Round Table, that Edna Ferber was a customer and that she had even known one of my idols, Lorenz Hart. It never occurred to me then that anyone in my family could ever have had a colorful past.
Sadie ordered lunch for us every day at her salon, to me the most boring place in all New York, with middle-aged ladies trying on fur coats, strutting up and down before long mirrors. I’d sit in the back room amid piles of remnants thumbing through trade journals about the fur-coat industry and wondering at the weirdness of it all--why buying a fur coat required endless discussions about cuffs, pockets, collars and linings. To me, all the coats looked the same. In her shop, I felt like an outsider in many ways--as a boy in an adult world, as a hick Oaklander in sophisticated Manhattan, as a male in a female shop and as a middle-class kid in a mink-lined world.
Sadie loved showing off New York--or just showing off for her small-town cousins, like the way she pushed her way into Sardi’s and, in that asthmatic voice, embracing Vincent Sardi: “How ah ya tahday, Vincent. Ya got a nize table faw us?” He did indeed, bowing slightly as he personally escorted us to a prize red leather booth.
Sardi’s quickly became the most exciting moment of my trip thus far. I was then deeply immersed in cartooning and was transfixed by the famous wall-to-wall caricatures of celebrities that frequented the restaurant, hundred of sketches as far as the eye could see. I asked if it was OK if I walked around and looked at the caricatures up close, difficult to do without leaning across people’s plates. I was struck not just by the drawings but by the inspired notion of decorating a restaurant with caricatures.
With its burgundy walls and little yellow shaded lamps on the tables, Sardi’s seemed to me the pinnacle of New York sophistication, the epicenter of Broadway, which of course it very much was then. Even now, when I meet someone for a drink at Sardi’s, I secretly want to examine the walls for new caricatures. I dine there occasionally but when I moved to New York I couldn’t wait to eat at Sardi’s, only to realize, to my great dismay, that I couldn’t afford dinner there on my own, sans Sadie. Six years after this trip, I went to New York on vacation with my friend Marshall, my musicals fiend who wanted to eat at Sardi’s. Sadie made the reservation for us and, when we asked for the check, the waiter said that it had already been taken care of. Sadie had struck again.
Not long after I moved to New York in 1963, my college friend and ex-colleague Bob Taylor visited and insisted we go to Sardi’s. Half in fun, to celebrate the occasion in a blaze of glory, he daringly ordered a baked Alaska that made us want to dive under the table in shame as the waiter wheeled it toward us in flames as every head turned to watch.
I’m hardly a regular there but, when I occasionally go, I still order a dish not on the menu that only insiders know about--chicken Sardi, and for dessert, boccone dolce. My friend Randy Poe is a regular at the tiny lower bar, where he chats up Jose the bartender, and knows the matre d’, Sardi’s grandson Vincent III--all of which makes me feel very much a veteran New Yorker but I sort of miss those early awestruck days.
Even so, Sardi’s still casts its old spell, even though you don’t see many glamorous stars there anymore, mostly just long-faded names like (on my last visit there) Sheilah MacRae, now just an old lady in a red hat pawing through her purse for a credit card. Long gone are the days when Rex Harrison and Kitty Carlisle and Walter and Jean Kerr graced the front tables. Today, they even allow tourists to eat downstairs.
More thrilling even than Sardi’s was my first Broadway play and musical. Sadie got us great seats for two big hits that summer of `53, “Dial M for Murder” and “Can-Can,” the new Cole Porter musical. I was shocked how small the Broadway theaters were, nothing like what I had been led to expect by the mythology that governs the New York theatrical world, where only giants bestride 42nd Street and each theater promises to be as grand as Versailles Palace.
The gilded interiors were pretty, with huge chandeliers, but smaller than the Fox Oakland and Paramount movie theaters at home. I had envisioned every theater would look like the Radio City Music Hall, where we had toured a day before. Also, majestic “Broadway” was surrounded by tacky Times Square joints of all kinds, swirling litter, hot dog venders and Good Humor carts, and bums of every description--not quite the splendor I had always imagined.
“Dial M for Murder” starred Maurice Evans, but the actor my father liked best was a part he might have played himself, the wily detective portrayed by the great British supporting actor John Williams. My dad praised Williams’s witty, understated style, which made me realize that great performances are not necessarily showy.
But the major event of the trip for me was yet to come--“Can-Can,” the first live musical I’d ever seen and the hottest show in town, much of it having to do with the sexy chorus line and a dazzling new Broadway discovery named Gwen Verdon. The show also featured a Paris music hall star, Lilo, and a favorite of mine from radio, Hans Conried.
“Can-Can” was playing at the Shubert Theater in fabled Shubert Alley, which seemed no bigger than our neighborhood Grand Lake Theater. Sadie had got us tickets to a matinee, a strange experience. I hadn’t realized Broadway shows were performed during the day. It seemed to me then, still does, that a musical demands the splendor of nighttime to glitter properly. A musical, to work its wiles, should undress in the dark.
Your first musical is as special as a first kiss--at least “Can-Can” was for me. I was knocked out by the frisky energetic dances and by the sexy, frilly, dance-hall dresses. I was both embarrassed and turned on by the line of can-can girls as they leaped high in the air, skirts lifted to reveal lacy petticoats, garters and pink panties, before landing in perfectly executed splits - a highly erotic experience for a lad of 15 from way out west.
Those saucy chorines set my head swimming and eyes rolling in my head. I’d never glimpsed anything quite so exciting except for my Esquire desk calendar girls, but each of these girls on the Shubert stage was alive and throbbing, just a few yards away, jumping and kicking and whirling - just for me.
Except for the circus, I’d never seen anything so big and busy and noisy indoors as a musical. Afterwards, I found myself fantasizing about the gorgeous young girls in the “Can-Can” chorus, as my adolescent sap continued bubbling, adding to the sexual thoughts I’d had about the girl on the train and would later harbor for a red-headed cousin I met in Washington. D.C., named Amanda (whose name even sounded sexy).
“Can-Can” was oozing sex, not just the chorus girls or even Gwen Verdon slithering around the stage as the snake in a slinky soft-core “Garden of Eden” ballet, but also in Porter’s suggestive lyrics, full of leering double entendres, in songs like “Never Give Anything Away,” “Come Along with Me” and the show’s big hit, “It’s All Right with Me” whose theme startled the romantic in me: that it’s OK to be attracted to a woman other than your girlfriend, a faintly scandalous concept. The score also included three of Porter’s most impassioned ballads: “C’est Magnifique,” “I Am in Love” and “Allez-vous-en.”
Most dazzling of all the numbers in “Can-Can,” however, was its brilliant title song, which exhaustively lists all the people and creatures and even machines that can can-can. Its astonishing, cart-wheeling, mind-boggling double and triple rhymes still make me grin with amazement at Porter’s fertile mind and rhyming facility (“If an ass in Astrakhan can,/If a bass in Saskatchewan can,/Then, baby, you can can-can, too!”).
“Can-Can” opened me up to everything that a great musical can be and made me a lifelong freak. It beguiled, moved, excited and delighted me in equal parts, blending all of the most bewitching elements of theater into one delicious, explosive, irresistible package, everything performed with high energy, great skill, personality and style. And yet such a show’s greatest appeal and miracle is that it all feels fresh and tossed-off, polished but playful, unlabored, extemporaneous, utterly of the moment.
There are many better, deeper, greater musicals than “Can-Can,” of course, but for me that show still defines a certain kind of musical now almost vanished -- a musical with a light tread, a romantic twinkle and innate pizzazz. When it arrived in `53 nobody could have known that it would be among the last of that kind of musical, then entering its final golden decade. Four years later, “West Side Story” arrived with a bound, packing heat.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The illustration is courtesy of Sardi's. This special extract from a work in progress is published by special arrangement with the author. All inquiries about this work should be directed to the author by use of the Talkback feature below. This excerpt first posted here June 25, 2007.
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