The Theater: New Vaudeville in Manhattan

Star Time (produced by Paul Small) is a creaky vaudeville coupé kept moving only because Lou Holtz, a tireless master of ceremonies, is between the shafts. There is one big-time act: the gracefully dancing De Marcos. Otherwise, harmonica players wrench the eardrums, songbirds ravish the mike, top-hatted Benny Fields suggests a crooner in a cinemusical about the early ’20s.

Stepping delicately across the eggs they have laid, Holtz again proves himself one of the best yarn-spinners and smooth-delivery boys in the business. He unveils all the acts, barges in on most of them, joshes the down-fronters, throws birdshot at the producer. He smooths out his old jokes without a wrinkle, tosses in a few less fetching new ones, continues the long saga of his best pal and mealticket, Sam Lapidus.

—Thin-faced, 51 -year-old Lou Holtz was born “in an alley” on Manhattan’s lower East Side. Before he was born, his father (a Russian Jew named Bruce) had gone “fishing to Coney Island,” was never seen again. Lou’s immigrant mother peddled hairpins and shoelaces, met, married and went West with a man named Holtz. Lou grew up in San Francisco, got stage-struck while still learning fractions, at 16 started singing in a dingy little café. Elsie Janis heard him, told him to head for Broadway.

On Broadway, as a song-& -dance man, Holtz was a flop. He flopped again as a comic until he got the idea of telling his Jewish stories in blackface, clicked in vaudeville, climbed to George White’s Scandals. Later Holtz abandoned cork for a cane, made vaudeville history by playing the Palace for ten straight weeks. The stockmarket crash dropped him “from a million to $732”; the decline of vaudeville drove him to pastures new; but after a dozen years of musicomedy, radio, Hollywood, show-producing, real-estate trading, today he has most of his million back.

Mama’s Boy. Holtz has been married twice but, as in the case of George Jessel, Milton Berle and the Marx Brothers, the best known member of his family is his mother, a shrewd, picturesque old lady with whom he lived for years between marriages. Whenever his mother met one of his new flames, she purred: “She’s nice. But I don’t think she’s as pretty as the last one.”

Holtz, who stutters offstage but not on, is equally funny in both places. His Thursday-night card games with Harpo Marx and George Burns are riots of unbowdlerized storytelling. Though Holtz can come up with cracks like “I hope your marriage lasts as long as mine seems,” his forte is not quotable nifties, but lengthy yarns, (whose point scarcely matters) that he tenderly unrolls like priceless fabrics richly embroidered with dialect. Fall guy of some of the best of them is Sam Lapidus, whose name Holtz lifted from a building sign 20 years ago. Typical Lapidus yarn (one fourth actual size): Finishing a stylish dinner, Sam and a friend from Tzicagi (Chicago) are confronted for the first time in their lives with fingerbowls.

Lapidus: For vhat good is it for vhat? It kent be soup — soup ve already hed it.

It kent be vawter — vawter is in the glesses, and vith lemon on the side has got me beffled complittly. I theenk I vill ask the vaiter.

Friend: Pliz dawnt hoomiliate me.

Lapidus: Vaiter, excuse the introoson, but for vhat are thiz two articles? Waiter: These are to wash your fingers in.

Friend: See, you esk a foolish question — you’re entitled to a foolish enswer.