Show Business: A King of Vaudeville

Jimmy Durante: 1893-1980

His voice was a loud rasp. His piano playing was strictly fortissimo. His gags were not jokes, but a litany of catch phrases. Yet Jimmy Durante was a born entertainer whose manic clowning stayed in fashion for more than half a century. When “the great Schnozzola” died last week, America lost one of its last links to the golden age of vaudeville.

Like so many comics of his time, James Francis Durante grew up on New York City’s teeming Lower East Side and left school early. From his Neapolitan mother, he inherited his legendary nose. From his French-Italian father, a barber, he got the encouragement to study the piano. By age 17, “Ragtime Jimmy” was performing in saloons from Coney Island to Chinatown, with a singing waiter named Eddie Cantor.

Durante’s career took off when he formed a vaudeville act with Tap Dancer Lou Clayton and Crooner Eddie Jackson. The trio played the Palace, appeared in a Ziegfeld revue, and provided the smash number for Cole Porter’s 1930 musical, The New Yorkers. Other Broadway hits followed, including Porter’s Red, Hot and Blue, which co-starred Bob Hope and Ethel Merman. It did not take long for Durante to get a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood. His first film, New Adventures of Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford (1931), was written by Charles MacArthur.

Though Durante continued to act in movies through It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad,

Mad World and Jumbo in the early ’60s, lis film appearances were generally unmemorable. He was at his best playing New York theaters and nightclubs, where lis free-wheeling (but never blue) imagination could run riot. In a typical turn, Durante would good-naturedly insult waiters, fire off his ineffable quips (“Surrounded by assassins”), and let loose with his nonsensical songs (Inka Dinka Doo). He delighted in flinging props at the band or in ripping apart his piano for laughs. When Durante took his antics to radio in the ’40s and television in the ’50s, he found millions of new fans.

Until he suffered a stroke in 1972, Durante had as much vitality off-stage as he did on. Throughout his life, he would stay up late with show business cronies, joking around. In a profession where rivalries tend to be fierce, he had no known enemies. Nor did he adopt Hollywood vices, except for an occasional visit to the track. A devout Catholic, Durante lived in a modest eight-room house and worked tirelessly to raise money for the Damon Runyon Fund for Cancer Research.

He took a break from performing only once—to care for his first wife, Jeanne Olsen, when she was slowly dying in the early ’40s. Though he later married again, he would invoke Jeanne’s nickname at the end of his TV appearances: for a few seconds, Durante would turn uncharacteristically somber and then bow off with the line, “Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.”