Max Wilk Interview #1

Michael Kantor: All right, watch your head. We’re shooting film.

Max Wilk: This is amazing.

Michael Kantor: The Broadway musical is an amalgam. What’s it made out of?

Max Wilk: It’s made out of burlesque, it’s made out of vaudeville, it is made out of tin pan alley, it made out of operetta and it’s made out of choreography. It’s a tremendous amalgam and also don’t forget the scenic designers who went to work on spectacles and then began to build up all kinds of wonderful images and stuff that day. Could relate to the musical comedy. The musical comedy that I remember has the magic word comedy in it. Comedy has begun to disappear. It’s no longer the musical comedy, it’s musicals.

Michael Kantor: Let me understand that. When I say Broadway musical, we’re not, I’m not necessarily really thinking about Broadway musical. I’m thinking musical comedy, right? Explain that.

Max Wilk: It’s no longer comedy because the comedians have disappeared. We don’t have them. They managed to disappear into television when they were lost to the musical theater. Comedy musical was usually a vehicle for a comedian or a performer, a Fanny Brice or an Al Jolson or a Clark and McCullough or people of that ilk. Wonderful people, Durante, Lou Holtz, Jack Pearl, all kinds of people. They would build a show around these people. And those people were essentially comedians. Even Fred Allen was a big star on Broadway, because he could adapt his comedic monology, monology is a good word, to be in a Broadway show. And it was a review. Charlie Butterworth, Willie and Eugene Howard, there were dozens of these people. It was a golden era for them, and George M. Cohen was another one of those people, about whom the whole thing rested on their shoulders.

Michael Kantor: Great, let’s go back to those really early roots. What do you think brought all those things together here? Why is it an American art form?

Max Wilk: I never thought of it as anything else. I mean, the English had their own form. The Germans had operetta. The English had a music hall type of comedy, but it didn’t adapt what the British will take and do music hall pantos at Christmas time. The rest of the year, they love to do operettas. They just sit there and eat candy and sniff into their handkerchiefs, and they love that operetta field. American musical comedies have never really thrived. In England. It’s funny. You’re talking about Little Me. Little Me didn’t do well in New York so Cy Fuhrer sent it over to London and they did it with another guy.

Michael Kantor: All these European things, what hap-

Max Wilk: No, no, Cohen, Cohen was strictly American. He was, he was his own persona. He was a song and dance man. And he was a brilliant song and dancer and came out of Vaudeville. The five Cohens or the four Cohens, how many Cohens there were. Go see the movie, there they are. They moved into Vaude, they moved from Vaudevill into the theater and they were a smash hit. He was. With his dynamism, the most incredible performer that ever was on a stage. I only saw him once and I saw him and I’d rather be right. And even then he was amazing. He wasn’t comfortable, but he was a amazing. Why is that American is what you’re asking. Because I think we have energy in our theater that doesn’t exist in French or British or European theater. We have a different kind of American energy, which came out of vaudeville, which was an American invention, and also we gave the American audience something they lapped up, which was that kind of, I’m a Yankee Doodle dandy, Yankee doodle do or die, you know. But that gets an audience up on its feet. They love that. And that doesn’t happen in England. They don’t give way in England, and I don’t know about French musical comedy. There isn’t a great deal of it. But that’s, I think, the essential difference is our energy is what gives it to the stage and gives it the audience.

Michael Kantor: What about sort of right before that, give me a sense of the immigrant and the ethnic worlds that fed into it, the Harrigan’s and Hart’s.

Max Wilk: Ah, yes. Well… Bye. That’s the other amalgam, which we’re all talking about. The Irish, wave of Irish comedians, Harrigan and Hart. Then comes the Italians. The Italians come in and they do their wonderful song and dance material. My Mari Ucce, she’d take her to steamboat kind of thing and all of that stuff. And then come these incredible immigrants from the Lower East Side who sort of just move in and take it over, because they have… Found a way. They have all these immigrants have found a place in which it doesn’t matter who you are, whether you’re Italian, whether you are Irish or whether you Jewish, you can make it on that stage. You can get an audience to love you. It doesn’t it matter. It’s one of the few places you can do it. So they flocked into the theaters. Got themselves into Vaudeville, and they got themselves into the theater by hook or by crook, and there they are. Oh, blacks, too. Don’t let’s forget, every once in a while, some black would come through out of minstrel shows and dynamize an audience, and that was his way of coming through, too, it’s amazing when you think about it, because it’s the melting pot that created the musical comedy. Really is.

Michael Kantor: What are, when you think of the Broadway musical, what are some of the adjectives that you think of to describe your.

Max Wilk: Anarchy. Dynamism, hilariousness. Hilariousness, hilarity, not hilariousness, delight, absolute delight, not to mention beautiful girls coming down and doing kicking high kicks so that if you’re a little boy you can see what a lady looks like for the first time. This is an amazing event in your life for God’s sake. I mean in this era. When you’re looking at it today, it means nothing. I mean, girls come out. It’s like going to a burlesque house. I mean that’s the first time. We all lied. We said we were going to see the comedians. We weren’t going to the comedian at all. We were going see Gypsy Rose Lee or Margie Hart or all those people. But that’s, and also that’s what I think children today don’t get, which is the contact with the people up on the stage. Well, Broadway was a place… That I went to all the time because my father had an office at 42nd and Broadway. So I knew there was this place called Broadway. There were also theaters all the way around the block. There were theaters across the street. There were theaters down the other street. Everywhere you looked, there were theaters. And every one of them had a show in it. As fast as one closed, another one came in. Broadway to me was a magic place. I just, you know, you walked into one of those theaters and you were transported into another world. And when you’re young, that was much more interesting than television because television is something you can turn off and on. But you go into a theater and the lights go down. In the theater, the lights come up and the orchestra starts to play an overture and you’re carried away. I mean, right away. This is incredible. We’re here. We’re in some small town in the west, or we’re down in Mexico, or we are in Spain, or I don’t know where we are, but the girls come out and they start dancing, and everybody does an overture number, and then all of a sudden out come the comedians, and you know you’re in some kind of a wonderful place, and you get carried away. That was a trip, a whole trip. And uh… There’s nothing like it today. I mean, there are shows today where you can get carried away. Incredible shows like The Lion King. But that’s a tough one, and there’s only one of those. And you don’t take kids in to see what I used to see. Of course, I sound like an old man saying it was much better in my time. But in truth, I felt it was better. I feel it’s better. I don’t go to the theater with the sense anticipation that I used to have. When I was nine years old, of course I don’t.

Michael Kantor: So if someone mentions Broadway to you now, what do you think?

Max Wilk: Well, I think of how important the production cost is. I think if somebody telling me who has just written a musical, which is going into rehearsal next year, that the budget is going to be $10 million. And I think, ow, how can that be? And I also know they’ve been working on it for three years.

Michael Kantor: What do you think, you touched on it a little bit in terms of the dynamism, but what do you think the musicals that we’ve loved over the years say about us as a country, as a people?

Max Wilk: There aren’t many that i can think of that have statements to make about us uh… Unless you’re talking about What? What? Well, yeah, you know, 1776 is a specific statement about what we are. I think, I’ve never thought of this, so I have to think about it while I’m talking about it. Some of the musicals we have give us an incredibly warped poof image of what we really are. There are satiric musicals, however. That make a very good statement about us, such as, of the I sing, I’m thinking out loud. Love life, which have satiric edges to them. And also other things like Johnny Johnson, which Wilde wrote, and other things that Rogers and Hart wrote, like Pal Joey. But generally, the musical that you’re talking about of the early 20s and 30s did not have too much to say about us when they did a show like Let Them Eat Cake in the depths of the depression. Nobody really wanted to see it. But we didn’t go to the musical to get a message about ourselves. We went to the Musical Theater to be amused and to have something to sing about. I think that later on, when you get into the late 30s and the Depression, there were some attempts to do stuff and Yip Harburg could come up with something like Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? You would be surprised if you looked through all of Larry Hart and Dick Rogers to find there’s very little social consciousness in any of those shows, except once, and Well, 10 cents a dance. There it is. We didn’t get to making comments about ourselves to the audience much until after the war. And then some shows will come in. And then there are not too many of them.

Michael Kantor: What do you think is the myth of Broadway? Does Broadway have a myth?

Max Wilk: Oh sure, but unfortunately you have to find it in Hollywood when Warner Baxter says to Ruby Keeler, you’re going out there with nobody but you’re coming back a star. That’s the Hollywood myth about Broadway and that’s the Broadway myth about itself. You know, you go and see a show like Pajama Game and a little girl comes out and does steam heat and she becomes a star because one night, She can’t do it and Shirley MacLaine steps in for her and Hal Wallace is sitting in the theater that night and sees Shirley Maclaine do steam heat and psst, there she is, she’s a star. There it is, the story comes to full circle and it works.

Michael Kantor: So set that up, you know, just very straightforwardly, which is just in the Broadway musical theater, there’s this idea, the myth is that, and that you can become a celebrity overnight.

Max Wilk: Absolutely. I mean, in New Haven, as a Yale undergraduate, I’m sitting in the theater and I’m watching a girl come out in the middle of a show called Leave It to Me, and she’s wearing a big fur parka, and she is surrounded by four chorus boys, and she starts to sing a little number called My Heart Belongs to Daddy, and by the time she’s finished the song, the chorus boys are dancing with her, one of whom was June Kelly. And there is a little lady named Mary Martin. She has just emerged into the scene. And everybody says, my god, she’s great. And she’s going to be a star. And she was. That’s what the musical could do. And it was Betty Grable could do the same thing, you know. And there were dozens of people who broke through that way. June Allison, you name them. Ginger Rogers, of course. And, uh… That, I think, is the thing about the musical is a place where anything can happen, and I don’t want to say unusually does, but that’s what happens. Musicals were, and then they also could be a terrible disaster. I mean, I don’t think anybody can ever have as big a disaster as a musical that flops. That’s just the end. I mean you could go to the Schubert and watch people. Struggling against flop sweat, which is that wonderful word. And then I remember one night at 11 or 12 o’clock that one of the people came out on a star, I think it was Phil Baker, and he came out and said to the audience, folks, we don’t have a finale figured out yet, so would you just mind going home? And that was the end of the show. I mean, it was like that, disaster.

Michael Kantor: What do you think Broadway, at that period where Hollywood was creating the myth, what do you Broadway represented to America at this time? A million hearts, they.

Max Wilk: But that’s Hollywood. The Hollywood statement about Broadway was always bigger than Broadway because the Hollywood, see, what you’re offering to me is a question is, what did it mean to New York? Actually, it began to die in New York and it was picked up by the Hollywood people who took every songwriter they could get their hands on and every star and every choreographer and everybody, moved them lock, stock and barrel out to Hollywood And it was a pretty tough time for musicals, and it didn’t revive until like the end of the 30s and the beginning of the 40s. And that’s when Oklahoma came in and revolutionized that old form that we’re talking about.

Michael Kantor: But the Hollywood Hollywood myth

Max Wilk: The Hollywood myth said a million hearts beat quicker there and it’s your Broadway and it is my Broadway and its Broadway rhythm and Broadway melody and I mean Broadway was the magic word and that’s what they used it for because it was a symbol and you know that wonderful shot of Broadway at night with the Times Square lights flickering and the tire sign and the gasoline sign and all that. That was the cliché about Hollywood, and you can write the story to go with it any time because they wrote it about 45 times a year.

Michael Kantor: And you said it was a symbol, what was it a symbol?

Max Wilk: Possibility. I think possibility.

Michael Kantor: Give that in a sentence.

Max Wilk: Broadway was a symbol of possibility. You could, anything could happen in New York. That was it. It didn’t happen in Hollywood, you know. But Hollywood was a great raper of talent. I mean, as the minute anybody like Van Johnson showed up and pal Joey, Warner Brothers signed him up and sent him right out to the coast. And he was there. Same thing about Gene Kelly, same thing about June Allison. All those people were just picked up and run out to the coast. Where they became members of the Freed Unit or some other place and they were Betty Comden and Adolf Green and all of them worked out there. There went the musical.

Michael Kantor: Describe the importance of the out of town tryout.

Max Wilk: New Haven, New Haven was a melt, no it’s not a melting pot, it’s a crucible. New Haven you come into New Haven on Sunday and you hang the show, this is how it used to be, you hang this show Sunday and Monday and Monday you start to rehearse somewhere in a hall somewhere, everybody is getting everything ready, the show nothing is ready. Everything is being prepared. Tuesday, you try to do a dress. You can’t. You do a technical rehearsal. Wednesday, you do a address. And then Thursday, you open. This is the first performance. It’s appalling, because the fact that you could do it at all, it was amazing. And then everybody runs into the lobby at the intermission and says, the lights are wrong. The costumes stink. That she’s garbling my music, she’s doing this. We used to stand there and watch the people in incredible arguments going on all over the theater. And then, oh, they were drunk and they were reeling around goods, they were so exhausted. And then the show finishes, and then everybody repairs to Casey’s across the street, gets a few drinks, gets really drunk, and then goes upstairs to a meeting at one o’clock to talk about what we’re gonna do the next show. Tomorrow night, and this goes on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday matinee, and Saturday night, and then they pack up, and by this time, they’ve called everybody in New York to come up to see it, to see if they’ve got notes or changes. No wonder Larry Gelbart said, you know, for Hitler should go out of town with a musical. That would be his greatest curse. It was an experience like nothing you’ve ever seen. My father used to say to me… After he retired, he would like to open a booth in the lobby of the Schubert Theater in New Haven in which he would have a librettist, a lyricist, and a composer, and a director. And there would be a wrecking crew that would sit there and offer advice and counsel on how to fix the show in New haven. And then everybody would take off and go to Boston, Godspeed.

Michael Kantor: What were you saying about New Hampshire?

Max Wilk: I said after I went through my own harrowing experience in New Haven that I finally thought if you haven’t died in New haven you’ve never died at all. And it’s true. It’s a unique harrow experience. That’s all.

Michael Kantor: Tell me, let’s go back to the turn of the century, who were the businessmen who made Times Square the center of theater in the country? Who helped to build it, not creatively, but in terms of…

Max Wilk: Oh, you mean, are you talking about the magnets, the magnets? Well, of course, you’ve got to talk turn of the century, and you’ve gotta be a little later. I think probably we’re talking about Schubert’s. We’re talking Mr. Erlanger. We’re taking about Mr. Keith. And we’re taking there were a couple, sorry, I’m not thinking.

Michael Kantor: I’m heading toward Oscar Hammerstein first.

Max Wilk: Oh yes, Oscar Hammerstein the first was the man who he brought opera to New York. He built the opera house and is it safe to say what the man said, the decorator said to Oscar Hammerstien when we got all through decorating the theater, what would you like me to put on the seats? And he said asses. That ain’t sad. When he was interviewed a few months later, they said to him, Mr. Hammerstein, is there any money in opera? He said, yes, mine. He was a wonderful, venturesome human being. He was flamboyant, and he was wonderful. He had the guts to follow his dream. The theater is still there, and so is the Hammerstein family. It’s a theatrical dynasty.

Michael Kantor: Let’s go back to to Cohen for a second. You talked about his dynamism, his energy. What were some of the songs that Cohen wrote? And in a way, why is he the father of Broadway?

Max Wilk: Uh… That’s a tough question he had he had songs. I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, born on the 4th of July. Give my regards to Broadway. I guess I’ll have to telegraph my baby needing money, you know. The thing about Cohen was he knew how to touch the pulse of the people and he pressed that button over and over And he was brash, and he was shrewd. And he was smart, and he was a good dancer, and he a good singer. He was a song and dance man. And he projected that into a whole persona, and that’s the persona that can carry a show. And that’s how he did it.

Michael Kantor: And do you think Cagney, tell me if you think Cagny captured that.

Max Wilk: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And as a matter of fact, that’s the only… That’s the art.

Michael Kantor: In the movie version. In the.

Max Wilk: In the movie version, Cagney encapsulated Cohen, and in The Seven Little Foys he did it again, which is marvelous.

Michael Kantor: But what was it about Cagney in terms of, well, dancing?

Max Wilk: Irish, Irish-American, he trusted him, and Cagney would have, you know, would have never done anything to irritate or offend Cohen. And that was, you now, there was a real rapport there, which was wonderful. And the shows on the screen, it’s amazing. I mean, we all forget Walter Houston being the father and all those wonderful touches that went in there. And that incredible scene at the end where he goes tap dancing down the stairs of the White House, I saw that picture and I burst into tears. It was so good. I’m still crying because I’ve I’ve often thought that was one of the great pieces of musical comedy history brought to the screen, honestly. You know that wonderful story about Berlin, going to see Jerome Kern’s picture that they made of Till the Clouds Roll By, and he came out of the theater with Abel Green and he said, Jerry is turning over in his grave after this picture. And he, you know, they… They butchered so many, many stories of songwriters. That’s what Cohen was afraid of, that they would destroy his life and make it into one of those rotten movies he hated, and they could have.

Michael Kantor: Speaking of Berlin, what part did Irving Berlin play in creating the American musical?

Max Wilk: Should we go back to the original cliche which Kern said, you know, somebody said to him what part was Berlin hold in American popular music and Kern said Irving Berlin is American popular music. And I think probably that’s the answer to what part he played. If you want to talk about Irving Berlin you can spend three days going on that about his impact, starting back in vaudeville. Moving on to Broadway shows when he was a young man, writing whole scores, which he did, and then going into those incredible, sophisticated music box reviews. And I mean, name it, he’s done it. There isn’t anything he didn’t do, including one of the most sophisticated reviews that ever was written called As Thousand’s Cheer, which I always thought was, there’s one of those afternoons you go to the theater and it’s magic, absolute magic. There’s Clifton Webb and Marilyn Miller and all the people and Helen Broderick and everything, and one surprise after another, one great song after another. And then Ethel Waters comes out and sings Supper Time about a lynching. And the audience goes, ugh. Because they’ve never seen that on a stage before. That was Berlin. He would take a shot at anything. And then, because at the end of the show, somebody comes out and says, hey, we don’t have a big popular song at the end, we do not have a finale. So they rush out and hand a song called Not for All the Rice in China to the cast, and the cast sings a finale, I mean, he had the guts of a burglar. He would do anything if it worked, and it did.

Michael Kantor: He was also good about integrating ethyl waters into a cask, wasn’t he?

Max Wilk: Absolutely, and there was a lot of argument about that. There was a, we laughingly called, color line that existed on Broadway, and, uh, it didn’t get broken for many, many years because the tradition was that black performers should stay in vaudeville or they should stay in minstrel shows, or they can do jazz numbers and they can this, but we don’t mix the two races. That was the way it was, it was a rule. I don’t know who made the rule, but it was rule. Berlin did put her in the show and she did get equal billing and he told the rest of the people if they didn’t like it, they would just have to learn to accommodate that fact. Very few shows that broke that color line. From then on, that was like 1933. You can go through the whole history of the 30s and not find many. You may find more in the 40s when you look and see Finian’s Rainbow. And you may find, there is one extraordinary. Exception to this rule.

Michael Kantor: Cabin in the sky.

Max Wilk: Yes, but it was all black. No, there is one further extraordinary exception of this rule, and it’s called swinging the dream.

Michael Kantor: Burt Williams.

Max Wilk: I wish I could have seen him. I’m old, but I’m not that old. He was a Jamaican who came to this country. He was monologist and a singer. He was genius on a stage. Everyone who ever worked with him, he did break the color line. Mr. Ziegfeld put him in Follies. And he played with W.C. Fields and Ed Winn and all those people. He was a star in his own right. He was a brilliant man. He sang songs like Nobody, which is a wonderful song. He sang song like Everybody Wants the Key to My Cellar, which was when Prohibition came in in 1919. He wrote, Berlin used to write songs for him. One of the songs Berlin wrote for him is Woodman, Woodman Spare That Tree, Do Not Tear That Down. It turns out this is the tree. That he would run up and hide when his wife went on the war path. And he would be up in the tree, so he says, Woodman, Woodman spare that tree. I mean, these were these incredibly delicious things that he used to do.

Michael Kantor: What kind of humor did he use?

Max Wilk: Oh, he had the humor of pain. He went into a bar. The story is he walked into a bar, and he asked the bartender for a martini, and the bartender looked at him and said, that’ll be $1,000. And Burt Williams, without saying a word, opened his coat, took out his wallet, and put $5,000 bills on the bar and said, I’ll have 5. And that was, there’s the pain story of all time, isn’t it? And that’s the way it was in those days. It was really, you know, they were the exceptions to the rule, believe me. But there were, God knows they were talented.

Michael Kantor: How did he have to perform for William?

Max Wilk: How did he?

Michael Kantor: Yeah, he performed, actually…

Max Wilk: Oh, sometimes they would say, no, actually he started out by performing in blackface, but he did away with that. He refused to because he was too light skinned for the audience in those days. But then, you know, now you get into the whole thing of Al Jolson getting blacked up in black face, which was the ultimate insult, that Jolsen would get in a black but the black men… Couldn’t work on the white stage. That was the white stages, what we’re talking about. But in those days, everybody accepted this. It was a conceit. I mean, if you want to look into the American popular song book and look at the works that were written about black people, which were called coon songs, you will be appalled to see what is on those pages. You know, songs like all coons look alike to me is one of the great big hits of that time, or if the man and the moon were a coon, what would you do? And then everything was coon town, but this was a hangover from the minstrel days in which the minstrals were all whites who put on blackface. It was, you know, I don’t blame anybody for resenting this era, and it was a horrible era. It’s gone, thankfully.

Michael Kantor: How did they popularize social dancing?

Max Wilk: Well, I wasn’t there. But before the war, they were a dance team, incredibly adept at dancing. And they did the Castle Walk. And then they had the Castle Waltz. And they had other numbers, all of which seemed to have been written for them by a wonderful, talented conductor composer named James Europe. Thank you. Quite sure of my history here, how they came together, but Jim Europe went to war along with Vernon Castle, who ended up being an airline pilot, Air Force, you know, was it Air Corps, whatever it was, he flew a plane and that’s when we lost him. And then Jim Europe returned at the head of a band.

Michael Kantor: Yeah, we’ll get to that story in a minute. But what about, you once made a reference to them as a couple relative to another famous dancing couple in terms of they were the.

Max Wilk: Well, they were the people who were the forerunners of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Is that what you mean? Yeah. Oh yes. But then you see, that’s the whole thing which has disappeared from the theater, which was the dance team. I mean, dance teams were always a staple of the theater because you wanted a class act, you go and get these wonderful dancers to come out, Veloz and Yolanda and people like that. Who would come out and do these incredible dance numbers, and it was very classy and very high quality, and it a class act, always, the dance team. Then you had the eccentric dancers who would out and tap dancing or funny. They were the soubrette and the comedian, and they were a part. Hal Prince said to me that they lasted all through the 30s, all through 40s. All through the 50s, there are still the comedy dance team that even end up in showboat. They’re still there. And if you look, that’s the original heart, what’s the word I’m looking for, the basis for where Vernon and Irene Castle came from. And they did their own shows too, because they were big stars.

Michael Kantor: What’s its relationship to Broadway? What was Tim Panell?

Max Wilk: The Tin Pan Alley was a couple of blocks in the 20s where all the song publishers set up shop and you walked down the street and there were offices all over the place. This is what they tell me, the ones who were there. Every publisher was in there, was Shapiro, Bernstein, and this fellow, and that. There were all of them there, Remix, Music, and, no, Remax was in Detroit. But this was at Harms, all these guys were there. And there were all people who set up shop recognizing, oh, well, this is a whole other history, my God. Publishing, song publishing, you could make money, because you sold the songs for a dime, and they were… Pitching songs to the public taste. Remember, no radio. Remember, not television. Remember, every house had a piano in the living room. That was a sign of great class. So what played on the piano was the songs that you bought. Now, where did you buy them? You bought them at the 5 and 10 at the Woolworths. And why? Because every Woolworth in America had a kiosk in the store. At which sat a woman who was known as a demonstrator. And that lady had all these songs hanging around. And you picked up a song and said, oh, I’d like to hear that song. And she would take the song and put it on the piano and play you some. And if you liked it, you bought it. And that’s how they sold songs. Those were the people who created the market for the songs. Also, they were called pluggers. And the pluggers used to go from night club to bars to grills to vaudeville houses and everywhere else and get up and sing the song and get the audience to get interested in the song and that’s of course where where berlin began he began as a song plugger miners music hall erving caesar said to me i went to miners music hall and there was erving berlin on the stage and he sang a song and i got i got very interested and i said this is what i want to do i want be a songwriter like that I want a song plug. And that’s, you know, this was also the opening of doors to a way of making money which immigrants had not had. And they were not barred from this job by anything that anybody said, no, we don’t want you. You’re Italian. You’re Jewish. You’re black. Even the blacks could publish songs and make money. And they did.

Michael Kantor: How did they use Broadway?

Max Wilk: Because it was a big thing to get a song into a Broadway show. And in those days, they were willing to interpolate songs. And so a producer would hear a song and say, hey, I like that. I’ll put it in my show. And there were no composers yet who could say, either you take the whole show or I write the whole show or not. But in this case, if a publisher heard a song and he liked it, he’d call a producer and say hey, I got this song, let’s put it in the show. Or a performer would pick up a song and say, I like this show, I like the song, I’m going to do a show, and go over to the theater and say like, just like Doris Day does in all those movies, I’ve got this song, Mr. Ziegfeld, can I sing this song for you? That’s not so far from the truth. And Gus Kahn would be sitting there smoking a cigar and blowing smoke at everybody, and they’d get the song and the show, and that’s how it worked. And it was, you know, there’s just enough truth in those musicals that Hollywood made to make it work. But that’s how songs, if you were a publisher and you could get a song on a Broadway show, that was a big thing. You could sell a half, half a hundred thousand copies or whatever it is that way.

Michael Kantor: If one of the first major leaps for the Broadway musical was the Princess Shows, what were the Princess shows?

Max Wilk: They were done in the Prince’s Theater.

Michael Kantor: I know you spoke with one of the principals at the end of his life.

Max Wilk: Oh, Mr. Woodhouse, of course.

Michael Kantor: Outlined what were they, why were they important? How was that a step forward?

Max Wilk: They were very sophisticated, they were very clever, they were smart, and they were, and had wonderful music and lyrics by Mr. Kern. Mr. Kern and Mr. Woodhouse wrote lyrics. And Mr. Bolton usually wrote the plot. And these shows were like very good Eddie and stuff, and they did wonderful shows in a little theater called the Prince’s Theater. They had I mean, there are so many wonderful songs by Kern in those shows, including Look for the Silver Lining, which is part of one of those shows. It’s a marvelous score.

Michael Kantor: Who was Fanny Brice? What were her great talents?

Max Wilk: Fanny Brice was one of those incredible talents who came from the Lower East Side. Who was a comic, who was mimic, who is a singer, who was a dancer, who could do practically everything. And the audience adored her because she was one of theirs. And she was also a terribly funny woman, had a great sense of comedy. She She performed, Berlin always wrote for her. She was always in the, she made her way into the Siegfeld Follies with a Berlin song, Yiddle in the Middle of Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime. She had also songs like Don’t Send Me Back to Pretregrad and stuff like that, which she could do better than anybody. She also could do ballet. She could do the Dying Swan and Fall Down and everybody would laugh hysterically. Then she would come out and sing songs like my man and tear everybody apart. And they all knew that this was her song about her husband, who was a thief, who had stolen money from her. They all knew about this story. So when she came out and did that, it was astonishing. She could have the audience eating out of the palm of her hand. She was that funny. And every once in a while, you can see her in a movie, and you can catch a glimpse of that. About Fanny, and she was really the fabulous Fanny and Streisand did a good job with her. I thought that was a wonderful movie and a show.

Michael Kantor: How about Burt Lahr? What was his genius?

Max Wilk: Burt Lahr was so far out and so funny. There is a, you get a sense of Burt Lahr being, I’m trying to figure out the right word for it, that he is nobody’s fool, but he’s everybody’s fool. And yet, Burt developed a kind of sense of high class comedy. That he could, he started out by being everybody’s idiot kind of comedian. And then he discovered that if he wanted to do an imitation of Shakespeare or restoration comedy or as he ended up with Samuel Beckett doing Waiting for Godot, he could do it. He was incredible. He had this incredible gift. It’s very hard to express what he does unless you see him and then he’s He’s there.

Michael Kantor: What did he do in Dubary?

Max Wilk: Uh, he played a nightclub comic, no, a guy who runs the men’s room in a night club who falls asleep and dreams that he’s King Louis in the court of Louis XIV. And I remember him chasing Ethel Merman around the bed three or four times, and finally she said, come on, try it one more time. And he looks at her and he says, even if I caught you, I couldn’t do any good. It was so funny. He was brilliant. He was also a great worrier. And as anyone will tell you, including his son, who will tell, you that he worried about everything. He worried and worried and worry. I went backstage to see him once. In the middle of a show with, he was with Nancy Walker, with Dick Van Dyke, and two other comedians, and they were all having a wonderful time being great successors. And I walked into Burt’s dressing room, and he looked up, and he said to me, hey, Max, I need a sketch desperately. I need something to save me. I said, you’ve got all the material they ever want. No, it’s not working. I need Something else. He was like that, but he was a wonderful man.

Michael Kantor: Help me understand who Victor Moore was and take us into Of The Ice Singers.

Max Wilk: Victor Moore was a charming, lovable thunderhead. He was a lovely man. In the middle of the icing, he plays Alexander Throttlebottom. He plays the man who has made vice president who doesn’t know where anything is. He can’t tell you where everything, he goes to the Senate. They don’t know who he is. He’s a wanderer through the maze of Hollywood. I remember him better in a show called Leave It to Me in which he is the ambassador to Russia and he is married to Sophie Tucker. I mean, improbable as this may seem. They go to Russia and in the middle of the Russian steps he gets out and he sings a song called I Want to Go Back to Old Topeka. And because he’s now the ambassador of Russia, and he says, I want to go back to old Topeka. Topeka is eureka to me. Some people may think Topeka’s a hick town. To me, it’s a slick town, you’ll see. And we were all laughing hysterically because he had this wonderful naivete and you couldn’t fault him. He was a wonderful man. Funny, funny, funny.

Michael Kantor: Give me a sense of how these guys, referred to, I guess, as top bananas, just controlled the stage.

Max Wilk: Well, the ultimate was Durante. I mean, Durante was a force of nature. He would come out on the stage and sit down at the piano. And the days after, he played with Clayton Jackson and himself. They were a trio. And their idea was mayhem. They started in nightclubs, and they did vaudeville. And then on a Broadway show, he would sit down and play the piano, and he’d fight with the orchestra. Who’d say. You’re not playing it right. You’re playing the song wrong. I do what I’m doing, and he’d get up and he start tearing the piano apart and throwing it into the pit.

Michael Kantor: Durrani would be on the Broadway.

Max Wilk: Duranty would be on a Broadway stage, and he would get into an argument with the orchestra because he would say, you’re sabotaging me. You’re not playing it right. I know a note when I hear a note, and you’re not giving me the right note. And he’d get up and he’d gets so angry, he’d start dismantling the piano and throwing it into the audience, rather into the orchestra pit. And this went on, and you knew it was mayhem, and you know that it was outrageous, and you new it was all rehearsed, but it looked spontaneous. And then when Merman came out, and in a show I saw called, forget it, I’ll think of the title. No, no, no. It was another show. It’s All Yours. They had a number called It’s all Yours that was written by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. And they tore the audience apart. I’ve never seen anything like it. And they had chorus after chorus. And she’d laugh, and that’s when he yelled out, don’t raise the bridge, lower the river. And I fell in love with him for the rest of my life. I used it as a title for a book. Hello, is this the meat market? Well, meet my wife at 5 o’clock. Hang up and go right on to these terrible jokes. But he was, he had, the audience adored him. He was such a wonderful person. And when I met him, he was one of the few comedians I knew. Was as saintly, as funny as he was offstage. He was not a bad guy. He was a wonderful guy and it came out. When he walked down the street, when you go across the street with him, I went down Times Square one day. Everybody’s yelling, hi Jimmy, hello Jimmy. You know, the taxi cabs are stopping. The bus drivers are yelling and he’s waving and he is having a wonderful time. That’s the connection he made.

Michael Kantor: Why were Rogers and Hart so eager to come back and do Jumbo?

Max Wilk: Boy, you really switched, didn’t you?

Michael Kantor: We’re on Durant.

Max Wilk: Now, Duranty Shell, well, they had had a horrible time in Hollywood. He had been, they’d been, Rogers and Hart had done stuff that they hated doing and they were being wasted and thrown into jobs like Hollywood Party, which was a disaster. And I saw it. It’s really a strange movie. But, uh… They then did a movie called Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, which is a marvelous piece of work and totally forgotten. People know it, except for Al Jolson singing, You Are Too Beautiful. And they had desperate need to get back to Broadway. And there’s a song in Hallelujah, I’m A Bum in which they wrote, I Gotta Get Back to New York for Jolsen. And he says, I’ve got, you know, because it all takes place in Central Park. And somebody called up and said, Billy Rose said I’m doing this show called Jumbo and I want you to come and write the score. They were so happy to come back to New York. It was Nirvana. And they ended up writing a wonderful score and it was a big hit and restored their career. Because in Hollywood, if you weren’t a success. In Hollywood, that was disaster. That was like being exiled, total exile.

Michael Kantor: What was the Durrani joke in Jumbo about the…

Max Wilk: Oh, well, he comes out leading an elephant, and the sheriff looks at him and says, where are you going with that elephant? And Durante says, what elephant? Oh, he was so funny. God, I know another story about it. He was in a show called, Strike Me Pink.

Michael Kantor: So, this is the Army. When did you join the troop, and give me the name of the show, and what did you do?

Max Wilk: I was what was known, and this is the Army, as a public relations man, semi-skilled. That’s my Army rating. I always thought the semi- skilled was a little demeaning. I joined the show at the end of August. They sent me up from Florida, and I went to work ahead of the show. I toured ahead of this show. The show left the Broadway theater. And then moved to Philadelphia, if I’m not mistaken. And I went ahead from, I did not go to Philadelphia. I went to Cincinnati. I went all the cities. I went Washington. Now, Washington was the first place we went to and I had to go down to Washington because we had a presidential performance in the afternoon. The band, we had huge band, Milton Rosenstock had a. Like a symphony orchestra in the pit. And they started playing this, this, the Army, Mr. Jones. And they marched down Broadway and people were going, goodbye boys, give them hell, boys. You know, they thought we were going overseas. And they were actually getting on a train in Penn Station and going to Washington. We didn’t go overseas for another year and a half. But it was an amazing experience because the people were yelling and screaming at us all over the streets. Then we went to Washington.