Books: On the Pedasill

SCHNOZZOLA, THE STORY OF JIMMY DURANTE (256 pp.)—Gene Fowler—Viking ($3).

At the end of his radio & television shows, Jimmy Durante lowers his voice to a hoarse throb and murmurs, “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.” Who Mrs. Calabash may be, nobody knows, and Jimmy won’t say. His friends like to believe that his airwave salute to her symbolizes the Durante character: grotesque tenderness beneath the mask of a public clown.

The relation of the public Jimmy to the private Jimmy is one of the main preoccupations of Gene Fowler’s story. Schnozzola is not as spectacular a performance as Fowler’s life on John Barrymore (Good Night, Sweet Prince). But it pours a foaming pitcherful of legend and anecdote, and Durante’s numberless followers should be left reasonably happy.

“Brandied as a Criminal.” The son of a lower East Side barber who liked to pass out money in the streets, Jimmy began his career by punching a honky-tonk piano for 75¢ a night. After working in a score of saloons before he was 22, he graduated to a Harlem cabaret, where he played the piano for $45 a week “from eight o’clock at night till I was subconscious.” The boss stifled Jimmy’s attempts to be a comedian; he didn’t like piano players who tried to be funny. But the comedian could not be stifled for long. In the early ’20s Durante became pivot man in a wild comedy trio he formed with Cakewalker Eddie Jackson and Soft-Shoe Dancer Lou Clayton. They “cut up millions of dollars” in the next decade and, says Clayton, never needed a written agreement to cover the division of the spoils.

Since the early days, much of Durante’s humor has been based on a good-natured release of destructive urges. Once, looking for a strong finish for a musical-comedy skit about bike marathons, Jimmy threw his bike into the orchestra pit—and had to promise in writing not to throw anything at musicians again. A pompous ad extolling the uses of wood in modern life inspired his famous “Wood Number.” Rushing wildly through a nightclub, Jimmy would tear up wall moldings and toilet seats, grab salad bowls and meat blocks to make a huge pile of trophies in mid-floor, while he chanted the glories of wood.

The Durante career had its seamy side, too. One big source of income for the trio was the Manhattan speakeasy they ran during Prohibition, a favorite gangster hangout. But Jimmy managed to dodge real trouble. The only time he was pinched for selling liquor, he moaned, “I’m brandied as a criminal.”

Spontaneous Shrewdness. Jimmy’s personal life, as painted by Biographer Fowler, strongly resembles a Grade B movie plot about show business. He was constantly troubled by a conflict of purpose between the two people closest to him: his wife Jeanne and his closest friend, Clayton. Jeanne Durante wanted Jimmy to spend more time at home with her; Clayton kept pushing him upward in the entertainment world. Jimmy, trying to please both, never did solve that problem, though in effect Clayton won. After Jeanne’s death in 1943, Jimmy was often irked by a guilty feeling that he had neglected her.

Most of Durante’s word-mangling is spontaneous, Fowler swears—though Jimmy is shrewd enough to know that “if I learned to pronounce the big words, 60 of my pals would be out of work next day, includin’ myself.” Fowler has collected dozens of Durante’s malapropisms. In a low mood, Jimmy once said, “The red corpsuckles is gone from my veins. I’m just a hollow shelf.” Another time, when he had mistaken a firebreak clearing in the woods for the highway, he remarked, “Us perfessors don’t get out of the chemical lavatory too often.”

“A King’s Transom.” Jimmy Durante emerges from Fowler’s pages as a strangely unworldly creature driven by a deep wish to be liked by everybody. He seems genuinely surprised to be making “a king’s transom.” He dislikes any sort of adulation: “I don’t want nobody to put me on a pedasill.” And he is a notorious soft touch: in 1935 a Broadway character known as Cooney the Boom formed a moochers’ syndicate which touched Jimmy for $5 a head after each night’s performance of Jumbo and then kicked back 50% to Cooney.

The essence of Jimmy’s character, as drawn by Fowler, is revealed in his visit to Rosie, the elephant who had co-starred with him in Jumbo and then turned melancholy when the show closed. “Rosie! Rosie! It’s Nosey!” said Durante. Rosie trumpeted and lay down on all fours, as she had been taught to do in Jumbo. Jimmy tried to wrap his arms around her. “Rosie ain’t forgot me,” he cried, tears in his voice. “Look! She still loves me!”