M-M-M-Mammy's Boy
GOLDMAN, HERBERT G.
MMMMAMMY'S BOY Al Jolson, the rabbi's son in blackface, never recovered from his mother's death HERBERT G. GOLDMAN The real "Jolson Story" began with a scream. The place was Washington, D.C.,...
...What d'ya mean, no...
...Jack leaves, is signed for a new show and begins rehearsal Then word comes that Jack's father is ill...
...Moshe soon arrived to bring him home...
...It is, nonetheless, historically important...
...The big hit of the picture was the new song, "Sonny Boy," sung—three times—by Jolson...
...You are a life member of the Al Jolson Association...
...Two weeks after the disaster, David J. (Pop) Grauman and his son Syd (later famous as the owner of the Chinese and Egyptian theaters in Hollywood) pitched a circus tent and started running vaudeville...
...Once again, Al ad-libbed: Did you like that, Mama...
...The real Yoetson household was never as tempestuous as the one depicted in The Jazi Singer, but it was never as idyllic as the one depicted in The Jolson Story, the 1945 color movie about J Olson's life...
...Some thought this was hypocritical...
...But Broadway's lure, and Mary's love, cannot be denied...
...He was the baby, named after her father...
...Certainly no human being...
...Aside from recognition as a star, there's nothing much left to stir the ambition of a fellow in my walk of life...
...Rehearsals for "Al Jolson in Big Boy," a musical comedy based on Charles T. Dazey's play, In Old Kentucky, started in the fall of 1924...
...Various explanations have been given for Al Jolson's professional decline in the early 1930s...
...When some of the actors suggested Joe do an act with Al and Harry, "Prof...
...You'll see if she isn't...
...In those days," recalled Irving Caesar, who wrote the lyrics to Gershwin's melody, "you wrote a song and then you tried to place it...
...Tell Asa," he said, "that a father does not go to a son...
...Al was shaken when he got the message, but he hurried to see Moshe...
...They requested General Henry H. Arnold, head of the Army Air Forces, to supply a special plane to fly two physicians to Los Angeles...
...Jolson is the • happiest portrait that can be painted about an American of the Jewish faith...
...A lotta nice green grass up there and a whole lotta people you know...
...Mayer took one look at Jolson and ordered him moved back to the hospital...
...Al's second movie was The Singing Fool, which, like The Jazz Singer, was only a part-talkie...
...Al, however, said he would perform "Mammy" in Sinbad and allowed Bornstein to use his picture on the sheet music...
...Friedman, the butcher's wife, she'll be jealous of you...
...Now his mother was screaming...
...In the first sound scene that was shot, Al sang "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face...
...Shut 'em for little Jakie...
...In March 1903, while performing in Philadelphia, Al's voice began to break, and his act was fired...
...Every time you weren't on, the people read their programs...
...What jarred him back into the real world was a trip into make-believe—the theater...
...Above: The finale from The Jazz Singer, 1927...
...Actors could be found en tour in virtually any town, an immediately recognizable part of Americana, yet a race unto themselves, without roots save in their profession, and without friends save for one another...
...Mama, darling, if I'm a success in this show, well, we're gonna move from here...
...The funeral was held within 24 hours, in accordance with strict Jewish law...
...What Al could not admit, of course, was that he was that boy...
...When Naomi died, Asa thought that his own life had ended...
...It would never leave him...
...Al's first entrance in Sinbad did not come until 15 minutes after the start of the show, and one of his valet's duties was to turn on the dressing room water taps so Al would not hear the audience applaud the other actors in the cast...
...Asa Yoelson, an eight-year-old Lithuanian immigrant boy in knickers, ran up the steps to the Yoelson apartment, where his mother had lain ill for weeks...
...spunk, his elan, in an era of convention, were refreshing—and magnetic...
...David Warfield in The Auctioneer and many others in plays bewailing the misfortunes that had happened to the Jew...
...L The Jazz Singer premiered on October 6, 1927, in New York...
...Why didn't you come...
...I'm sorry they did it," Jolson told a Chicago Post reporter, "and I'm going to write Mr...
...Jack Warner responded by using Jessel's "difficult" attitude as an excuse to approach Jolson...
...A decision was soon made to write a lyric to the melody and use it in a scene late in the picture...
...Twenty-year-old Al Jolson had turned the handicap to his advantage, and the audience was on his side completely...
...The action took place in a sanitarium, with Harry as a doctor, Joe Palmer as a suffering Jewish patient, and Al as a wisecracking orderly...
...The beginning of the "Jolson Legend" can be traced to Monday, October 1, 1906, the day Jolson opened in a tent called the National in San Francisco...
...Ironically, her grave is now in a black neighborhood in Washington...
...How was I?" he asked, still the child looking for approval...
...Mary's because they did not know what else to do with them...
...He kisses her...
...And then there came on the scene a young man, vibrantly pulsing with life and courage, who marched on the stage, head held high with the authority of a Roman emperor, with a gaiety that was militant, uninhibited and unafraid, and told the world that the Jew in America did not have to sing in sorrow but could shout happily about Dixie, about the night boat to Albany, about coming to California, about a girl in Avalon...
...Of greater interest than the published lyrics are the lines that Al inserted...
...Al married four times, but all were non-Jewish women...
...Soon thereafter, Al was belting "Swanee" to the rafters in performances of Sinbad...
...Al disliked the song and wanted to replace it...
...Before the war ended the motion picture industry took an interest in what would later be termed "nostalgia," kindled by the success of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Warner's biography of George M. Cohan starring James Cagney...
...The only clear alternative to singing was returning home to Washington and having Moshe set him up in business...
...In the months that followed, he and his brother Hirsch became Al and Harry Joelson...
...After he saw Reeves and discovered the theater, Jolson's thoughts, aims, needs and life were channeled...
...They spent the early evenings singing for the congressmen and other high officials who sat on the veranda in front of the Hotel Raleigh sipping tall, cool drinks...
...It was similar to Jolson's own life story, and Al saw it as the vehicle for his first motion picture...
...Buddy reportedly titled the manuscript " 'Sonny Boy' by Elmer Colby...
...On Sunday, the tour over, Al went to the Yoelson home and saw his father...
...In early 1894, word finally arrived from his father in America: "Come...
...They laugh...
...no radio, no movies, not even any listenable phonograph records...
...According to what Al later said—on one of the few instances he spoke about the subject—he just turned and ran...
...The harlequin—that mysterious figure of the ancient pagan rites who later found his way onstage by way of the commedia dell'arle—was just one influence on blackface...
...There is something supernatural in back of it, or we miss our guess...
...Jolson never denied his Jewishness...
...Oh, no...
...On December 23, 1944, severe chest pains forced Al into bed...
...Parks did not attempt to copy Jolson in delivering a song...
...the use of what was then considered a "hick name" would certainly indicate how DeSylva felt about the song...
...The toss of his mother when he was only eight years ok) deprived Jolson of the figure he tdotiied throughout his stage career and played to so poignantly in The Jjzz Singer—his "mammy...
...Years ago, I needed money, and needed it badly...
...What followed has become one of the most oft-told stories in show business...
...When the Demi- Tasse Revue opened, 50 chorus girls with electric lights in their shoes danced to the song, but few copies of sheet music were sold...
...There's the Ginsbergs and the Goldbergs...
...Harry, it developed, was not quite the "big businessman" his postcard had implied...
...Jolson was a figure from the "good old days" of peace, prosperity, and the simple virtues of the past he sang about in songs like "Mammy...
...This sound sequence ends when Warner Oland, as Cantor Rabi-•nowitz, comes into the room and cries out "Stop...
...He wrote to Peri Yoels, Naomi's second cousin in Seredzius, asking for the hand of her daughter, Hessi, in marriage...
...As family friend Mo the Yudelson looks on, the director of the show comes to Jack's home to convince him that his career will be ruined if he does not return to the stage (right...
...they walked with stooped shoulders...
...Asa was withdrawn for the next seven months...
...Jolson contributed the first line and Saul Chaplin of the Columbia music department wrote the remainder of the lyric...
...There were only live performances—plays, musicals, burlesque, minstrels, carnivals and circuses employing an estimated 40,000 performers...
...His lips were always perfectly synchronized with the recordings, and his flowing, stylized arm movements proved much more effective on the screen than Jolson's gestures had been in the thirties...
...Mama, stop now...
...Edith Boiling Gait, were scheduled to see, Al sent half a dozen tickets to the Yoelson home...
...The year before, the famous earthquake and fire had destroyed old San Francisco...
...The man was Asa's father...
...The yearning in his voice recalled the feelings that so many of them had for their homes, families and girls...
...Nonetheless, Al had admired the man he described as "a scholarly old gentleman"—an admiration that turned into reverence after Moshe's passing...
...Since their misbehavior had not started until after Naomi's death, the rabbi assumed what his sons needed was a mother...
...I'd rather please you than anybody I know of...
...The nervous, monotoned, self-conscious kid of just two weeks before was gone, his place taken by an impudent and joyous harlequin...
...He needed love, but it was not forthcoming...
...One of the great hits of his career, he did this song in many different ways—in dialect, as comedy, with pathos and with pulsating emphasis...
...It is from him that he inherited the comedy and the smile...
...He took them down to Washington by train...
...George Jessel delivered the eulogy...
...He recorded the "Kol Nidre," "Hatikvah" and even adapted the melody from "Hindustan" into a new song titled "Israel...
...The onstage Jolson was a curious amalgamation of two very different qualities...
...He spent all the time he could outside the house, hawking papers, peddling watermelons and, sometimes, getting into trouble...
...Then he leads his father's shut in the Ko) Nidre service (see cover photo...
...Despite myths that Jolson took all or part of his salary in Warner stock, Al was paid $75,000 for The Jazz Singer...
...Jessel said, in part: Not only has the entertainment world lost its king, but we cannot cry, "The king is dead—long live the king...
...He panicked and gave the Brothers his correct name and address...
...It was very cold and Asa dabbed at his eyes with his stocking-covered fists, determined to keep back the tears...
...Many years later, the scene would be reversed...
...Jolson can take a song and make it do things its composers did not dream were in it," Heywood Broun wrote in the World...
...The reviews for The Jolson Story were ecstatic—far and away the best notices any film associated with Al Jolson had ever received...
...We were just crazy, that's all...
...The seeds of rebellion were soon planted...
...Jolson first sang "Mammy" onstage when Sinbad reopened at the Shubert-Majestic Theater in Providence, R.I...
...There was not one word about his mother Naomi...
...In September the Graumans began construction of a wooden theater building on the same site as their tent...
...No dialogue was to have been included in the picture, but Al's adlibbing in the scene persuaded Sam Warner to include a sequence in which the cantor's son talks to his mother...
...When Al got sick and developed a temperature, he was taken to the infirmary where a more stringent examination uncovered a "tendency towards tuberculosis...
...Jessel, whose contract had been conceived in terms of silent pictures, demanded a voucher for an additional 810,000 before he would leave New York...
...A short story appeared in the January 1922, issue of Everybody's magazine entitled "The Day of Atonement...
...On the second chorus, he seemed to reach out, yearning for them to embrace him...
...Thirty-one-year-old Larry Parks had been selected to play Jolson...
...Al remained in Yonkers for a few days before being sent home to Washington...
...Never, something in him vowed, would he accept his mother's death...
...Al regained his full health...
...And the actors, even the great ones, came on the stage also playing characters like their fathers...
...Al was terribly self-conscious in his new role of comedian, and nearly sunk the act...
...Al Jolson, in Big Boy, garnered what are still the greatest critical accolades ever given a musical comedy star...
...Jolson often credited Reeves with giving him his start in show business—a psychological, if not factual, truth...
...The most historically noteworthy aspect of Jolson's 1919-1920 season was his popularization of "Swanee," George Gershwin's first and biggest commercial song hit...
...the two men lunched at Lindy's the next day...
...Oh, a whole lot of Bergs...
...Al and his brother Harry were soon on the train again back to New York...
...Jacks mother comes to his dressing room to plead with him to take his father's place center: Meanwhile, Jack has fallen in tow with Mary, a non-Jewish dancer, Mary argues that Jack should put his career before everything But Jack cannot abandon his filial duties...
...He called Buddy DeSylva in Atlantic City where he, Lew Brown and Ray Henderson were working on Hold Everything, starring Bert Lahr...
...Mama, listen, I'm gonna sing this like I will if I go on to the stage...
...Who's . . . who's telling you...
...Al's resentment of the "old ways"—prayer, study and devotion—and of his father's effort to re-establish discipline after years of absence, doubtless stemmed from Moshe's—and God's—failure to save his mother...
...When Al called back, an hour later, the new song was finished...
...Jolson played the rot* of Jakie Rabinowttz, a cantor's un who decides early in life to become an actor...
...At age 14, Al decided to go to New York and make another effort at breaking into show business...
...At the age of nine, he had found a new life in the theater, and a new source of love in the sound of applause...
...Naomi Yoelson was still screaming...
...The word isn't quite strong enough for the thing that Jolson has...
...The trip was typical of those endured by Eastern European immigrants...
...On December 23, 1945, around the time of his 88th birthday, Rabbi Moshe Reuben Yoelson died in Washington, D.C...
...Ever been to Dark Mill...
...Those old enough to have seen Jolson at his peak remember him as a galvanic figure belting out a song while dancing on the Winter Garden runway, or joking, his feet dangling into the orchestra pit...
...They tried to beg off when Jolson told them that he needed a new song, but Al reminded Buddy of all he owed him, and the three tired songwriters reluctantly agreed to write the number...
...His offstage life was taken up with ball games, prizefights, horse races and other action pastimes...
...In accordance with Jewish law, the funeral was held within 24 hours...
...Her eyes were open, but she appeared to look through her young son with no sign of recognition...
...Sonny Boy" would lead The Singing Fool to a S5 million gross within the space of 18 months...
...Moshe and Hessi were married by Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg of the Agudas Achim Congregation on Sunday, March 29, 1896...
...Vaudeville and the variety and the musical comedy stage and the legitimate theater had Ben Welch and Joe Welch, monologists with beards and shabby clothes telling humorous stories that had a tear behind them...
...Asa had been born eight years earlier in a log cabin in Seredzius, Lithuania, a small, predominantly Jewish village, the fifth child of Rabbi Moshe Reuben Yoelson and his wife, Naomi...
...But he tended to ignore them...
...But Al did not stay long...
...When Asa reached the age of six, his mother gave him violin lessons and encouraged him to practice with tales of the fabled Steinway Hall in New York City...
...Any attempt to comprehend Al Jolson's career must begin by understanding that "show business" and "the stage" were virtually synonymous before World War I. The entertainment business at the turn of the century was very different from what it would be 80 years later, and provided steady work for many more people...
...The final agony was upon her as a doctor tried in vain to stem her bleeding...
...Asa saw the doctor pull the sheet over his mother's head...
...But more than that, it is from Rabbi Yoelson that he received the form and content of singing...
...You'll see, Mrs...
...They sailed for America on the Umbria and arrived, seasick and disheveled, at Ellis Island on April 9. Asa became frightened when his mother broke away and ran to a strange man...
...Reacting quickly, Jolson climbed off the stage, mounted a chair, and did his act in the middle of the audience...
...Anniversary Song" by Al Jolson and Saul Chaplin eventually made a fortune...
...When Asa was four, his father left for America...
...Blackface would remain a mask for Jolson all his life...
...In the years that followed, Al would subtly turn back to what he termed "the ways of our fathers...
...He did not tell Al where he was going, but, after a month, a postcard arrived at the Yoelson home saying he was on his way to being "a big businessman...
...The boys' time was completely regulated, with regular hours for classes, study, sleeping, chapel—whether or not a boy was Catholic— and work...
...Unaware of just how ill his mother was, Asa spent most of his time outside the house with Hirsch, selling papers and exploring the new city...
...Al's funeral was held at two o'clock on Thursday afternoon, October 26,1950, at Temple Israel, 7300 Hollywood Boulevard...
...Mary's Industrial School for Boys...
...Their new home was a set of rooms above Barnes' Flour & Feed Store at, 208 Four-and-a-half Street in the southwest quarter of the city...
...He would often tell reporters that in the middle of "You Made Me Love You," a song from the Broadway show, The Honeymoon Express, a painful ingrown toenail forced him to drop suddenly to one knee...
...Al was cautious about movies...
...He leaves home and after years of struggle finally becomes a successful star as Jack Robin...
...Al would get a percentage of the profits, plus 810,000 for recording the songs...
...The other was, of course, the black man...
...In the fall of 1904, the Joelson boys teamed up with Joe Palmer, a Yiddish dialect comedian and singer who had been stricken with locomotor ataxia...
...That's an old song that my mother used to hum to me when I was a little child and she rocked me to sleep...
...Shields wrote the sketch—a good one—in about 10 days...
...The lines referred to the night in which eight-year-old Asa Yoelson had rushed in to find his mother dying in childbirth, only to have her look straight through him with no sign of recognition...
...He knew Al wanted the role...
...He trembles his under lip, and your heart breaks with a loud snap...
...This was not in bravado alone: this was the quintessence of optimism...
...Unimpressive as the comparison may be to Mr...
...I feel good...
...In the years that followed, he did not work on Yom Kippur...
...It was as if his father's death had brought Al to peace with his religion—and his God...
...For "Ma Blushin' Rosie," he did a total of 25 takes, the 10 best of which were used to piece together the recording heard in the completed film...
...It worked...
...When you listened to any of his songs, you noticed the half and quarter tones, the sigh and the sob, the sudden inflections of the voice and the unexpected twist—all these are elements that come out from the cantorial singing of our people...
...Several changes of trains brought them to Memel, the harbor, where they took a steamer to Liverpool, England...
...Jolson's talent, outside of his obvious gifts of comedy, song, and eccentric dancing, was basically his genius for communicating with an audience— establishing a unique "oneness" by which every thought, joke, utterance or lyric became a private moment between Al and anyone who occupied a seat...
...It was not, of course, and never would be...
...He sulked for a few weeks before he gave up and went back to Washington...
...The tune was J. Ivanovici's "Danube Waves...
...It was called "A Little of Everything," and was performed in a revue at a New York burlesque theater in October 1904...
...Al's involvement with military camp shows during World War II began only a few weeks after Pearl Harbor...
...You looked and felt like a performer...
...Al was astonished when Sid told him what he was doing: "God, I didn't know I was doing that...
...Then the plain pine coffin was put into a dark carriage and driven across the Potomac to the Talmud Torah Cemetery in Anacostia...
...The "mammy singer" had been born...
...Son," Al told Chaplin, "you're gonna make more money with this song than you ever made on anything before in your life...
...Al had tears in his eyes at that point...
...Less than a year later, he joined another circus...
...Al lay in state dressed in a blue suit draped in a white fringed tallis...
...The two doctors flown to Al's side were his own physician, Julius Hertz, and Edgar Mayer, renowned specialist on lung afflictions...
...Al was kept recording until well into December...
...Or else you'll wear pink...
...Will Jack daven at the synagogue...
...1927, th« tint commercially successful full-length talking movie...
...Rather, he created his own version of the Jolson style, a version that worked well on film...
...Whatever the real reason, The Honeymoon Express ran for a year and a half, buoyed by an audience in love with Jolson's stage antics...
...Al Goodman had his pit musicians play the number faster than it had been played before and "Swanee" became one of the biggest hits of the season...
...Jolson now had all the trappings of a major star—a valet, a chauffeur, a manager, a non-Jewish wife he kept in California, and money...
...The cantor cannot accept a ton who has entered show business...
...The Warner brothers, Harry and Jack, saved Jolson's life...
...he never denied God...
...When the show was over, Al had an usher sent up to bring Moshe backstage...
...By 1927, Sam Warner had acquired the screen rights to the story, which by then had been made into a play called The Jazz Singer...
...The modern musical comedy finally got off the ground, as composers, backed by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, won the right to control scores...
...Buddy, Lew and Ray were exhausted from hours of hard work...
...It was a dog-lyricked number called "My Mammy," banal and outdated even in the early 1920s...
...Buckets were kept in both wings of the theater as evidence of Jolson's extreme nervousness...
...His mother may have died when he was a child, but the audience was deathless...
...The rabbi refused...
...He needed motion almost as much as he needed applause...
...You'll never guess...
...The only difficulty lay in finding a story that could easily be wrapped around Jolson's character...
...You're gettin' . . . kittenish...
...Al was unable to attend...
...As Asa and Hirsch," Harry recalled, "we were Jewish boys...
...Those of us who tarry behind are but pale imitations, mere princelings...
...Moshe, Hessi and their children all sat in the balcony, Rabbi Yoelson having refused Al's offer of orchestra seats...
...Saul Bornstein (later known as Bourne) was the general manager of Irving Berlin's music...
...It would be his voice, dubbed in, but not his face...
...Popular songs like "Sweet Marie" and "The Sidewalks of New York" brought a shower of nickels from appreciative politicians, but the old songs— "When You and I Were Young, Maggie," "Oh, Dem Golden Slippers" and anything by Stephen Foster—made them throw dimes and quarters...
...Despite a pulsating rhythm in the chorus, it was vastly inferior to "Rock-a-Bye," then Al's best-known "mammy" song...
...As a play it was produced on Broadway starring George Jessel...
...The Grau-mans called their tent the National...
...You know, with this show...
...I was singing for God...
...There was something almost sexual about the way he related to an audience, as if a beam of emotional energy reached out and left each listener with the feeling that Al was performing for him or her and nobody else...
...Yes, she will...
...The 56-year-old Al was a father figure—a benign general who spoke in earthy terms and told the jokes that soldiers understood...
...Harry fancied himself a comedian, and Al jumped at the chance to be his straight man in a vaudeville sketch...
...opened at the Garrick Theater in Chicago...
...Rabbi Yoelson planned to put down roots quickly and then send for his family, but it took almost four years for him to get established...
...At the same time, that ringing brass voice was inspiring...
...Ren Shields, a special material and songwriter ("In the Good Old Summertime," "Come Take a Trip in My Airship" and others) agreed to write the three of them an act—for free...
...Cohn lost little time in getting to the point: Columbia wanted to do a picture based on Al's life...
...All his life, Al had been chagrined by what he felt was his father's stubborn refusal to give him wholehearted praise...
...At the suggestion of the printer, Al and Harry dropped the "e" out their name...
...That honor came to him on Monday, January 1, 1917, after Robinson Crusoe, Jr...
...His congregation also needed a rebbitzen, and he, still a relatively young man, needed a wife...
...I worked hard for it...
...Naomi raised the family in Seredzius—a "single parent" in all practical respects...
...At the age of 15, Harry left home with little more than $10 in his pocket...
...He seemed to be on a great search for something "up ahead" at the next outpost...
...The sad fact was that Al Jolson did not—and does not today—register well in any mechanical medium...
...Beginning in late August, the recordings were made for the soundtrack of The Jolson Story with full orchestra...
...When Jolson enters, it is as if an electric current had been ran along the wires under the seats where the hats are stuck...
...you'll see if I don't...
...But soon Cantor Rabinowitz enters the room and orders Jack to leave...
...We doubt whether anyone could ever take his place...
...Every theater except one burned to the ground...
...I'm glad of it...
...The three tunesmiths had taken Al's suggestion of a first line ("Somethinglike 'Climb upon my knee, Sonny Boy, 'though you're only three, Sonny Boy,' ") and written other lyrics to complete it in the most banal and maudlin fashion imaginable...
...A doctor diagnosed a recurrence of tuberculosis...
...The medium allowed him to show pluck and daring—an elan visible in the harlequin but also traceable in the black man's cultural approach to entertainment and sports, striking back, where possible, at white society and the subservient role it forced him to assume...
...DeSylva, Brown and Henderson were probably the most dumbfounded men in the business when "Sonny Boy" became the most commercially successful song of Jolson's long career...
...They decided to use vitaphone, a new sound process for movies, in the song sequences...
...All previous memories were submerged, buried...
...He quits the show on opening night and returns to his dying father's bedside...
...There is every reason to suspect that the story is true...
...The thought that he would never sing again drove Al close to insanity...
...The Warners did not offer him any stock, and Jolson certainly did not put up any money, as Jessel often claimed, to finance the picture...
...The "talkies" had begun...
...President Wilson was there with Mrs...
...Now I have all I need...
...A short time after he returned to Washington, the not-yet-12-year-old ran away with a fourth-rate carnival called Rich & Hoppe's Big Company of Fun Makers...
...The only song that seemed to be a problem was "Little Fella...
...As Al and Harry, we were Americans: friends and brothers to all other boys, whether they were black or white, Jews or Gentiles, Republicans or Democrats...
...I^ent you all those tickets...
...We wrote 'Swanee' and then took it to the Capital Theater, where George played it for the chorus girls...
...That Griffith did not direct comedies seemed a minor point to Jolson...
...Naomi, Rose, Etta, Hirsch, and Asa left Seredzius for Kaunas in a hay wagon on a cold night in March, 1894...
...I'm gonna steal something...
...It was most accurately described, in its own day, as a "home for wayward youngsters"— truants, runaways and petty offenders whose parents had placed them in St...
...And, darlin', oh, I'm gonna take you to Coney Island...
...Jolson," wrote Charles Darnton in the New York World, ' 'whether he knows it or not, hits the singing mark of his career with 'Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.' " Al sang the first chorus over the heads of the audience, as if he were alone in the vast theater...
...Men of thirty-five seemed to take on the attitude of their fathers and grandfathers...
...It was the one thing young Al Joelson dreaded...
...There was no television, where one group of actors could perform for an audience of more than 100 million at one time...
...Sonny Boy" had made Jolson the man of the hour— probably the biggest star in the world...
...On some occasions, he increased the beat on "Give me, give me, what I cry for" so that it became "Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, what I cry for" after he dropped to one knee...
...He thought the greatest safeguard lay in getting the illustrious D. W. Griffith, the director of Birth of a Nation, to direct him...
...Warner Bros, decided to star Jessel in a film version of The Jazz Singer...
...And the older they got, the more they prayed for the simple villages where they spent their childhood...
...I'll kiss ya and hug ya...
...Jolson, we should say that John the Baptist was the last man to possess such a power...
...He speaks, rolls his eyes, compresses his lips, and it is all over...
...Since they sold out almost every show and were reluctant to suspend performances, they had their new theater built right over the tent—while performances were in progress...
...The audience on the set applauded, and Al, as if onstage, said, "Wait a minute...
...More ironic still was the eulogy delivered by Rabbi Max Nussbaum: "Whatever he was came to him from his father...
...Al proceeded to sing "Toot, Toot, Tootsie...
...I couldn't...
...She was pregnant, with a host of complications that had never been explained to the young boy...
...It was possible, in 1903, for young performers to eke out a living in burlesque or small-time vaudeville with hackneyed, unprofessional material...
...The "Swanee" Al immortalized in song was really the Niemen River that ran beside Seredzius, Lithuania...
...On the other, he appeared to be a "man's man," sharing an outspoken camaraderie with every male member of the audience...
...Their humor came out of their own troubles...
...He sings, and you totter out to send a night letter to your mother...
...We can't imagine what we were thinking of to have said such a thing...
...I was singing for the president...
...A mob—"one of those milling, battling mobs that used to blockade cinema premieres to watch the stars pass by" was the way that Richard Watts, Jr., described it in the New York Herald-Tribune—flooded the sidewalk and street in front of the Wamer Theater that night...
...Al knew about TB—the "Jewish mumps"—that killed more Hebrew children than the pharaohs...
...Al became intrigued by "Swanee...
...Having little patience with modern methods, he propped open his sons' mouths with matchsticks to ensure that their voices would project properly...
...15 million...
...The place was Washington, D.C., just before sundown, February 6, 1895...
...Al Reeves, a third-rate banjo player, worked in blackface when Asa and Hirsch Yoelson saw him at Kernan's Lyceum Theater in Washington, delighting his audience with comments on the best features of each chorus girl's figure...
...I always have a picture in my mind of a black boy and his life story when I sing that song," Al said in a ghostwritten story...
...God," he said...
...Oh, yes, we're gonna move up in the Bronx...
...This communication was impossible in radio or movies...
...In the remade scene, Al sings a chorus of "Blue Skies" and then turns to his mother...
...When Jolson made his entrance, he found those front row seats empty...
...She says, "Oh, no...
...An operation had to be performed...
...Jolson's songs, humor and impromptu adaptation made a deep impression on a city that had undergone a recent holocaust...
...After seeing the first rushes, Cohn decided to pull out the stops...
...This scene had already been shot by the time that Warner made his decision, so it had to be remade...
...For the remainder of his life, until his father died, Al largely turned his back on religion...
...His Scenes Irom The Jta Singer...
...But the image of Jolson on one knee in blackface, singing to his "mammy," was the pose the world would remember...
...On Shabbos eve...
...In one respect, he was ethereal, the "black Peter Pan of the Winter Garden...
...The great humorist, Robert Benchley, crystallized the general impression in his review for Life magazine: A while ago we intimated that someone (we forget who just now) might take Al Jolson's place...
...4By the age of 19, Al was pretty much the Jolson that the world would know, willing to try anything, a sentimentalist, an extrovert with the enthusiasm of a small child and a moody cuss who alternated between braggadocio and self-deprecating pessimism...
...When they sang, they sang with lament in their hearts and their voices, always as if they were pleading for help from above...
...I'd like to have that star stuff ahead of me to be a sort of pacemaker to speed me up instead of having it in my pocket...
...From now on he had but one goal—to perform...
...I'm gonna sing it jazzy...
...Young Asa pushed open the door and saw his mother...
...Al Jolson" had arrived...
...Whatever you're in, whatever game you play, feel like you are the The irony is that Jolson did not want Jessel to do his eulogy...
...The Jolson Story had become the special project at Columbia...
...He would not star in the film himself...
...I don't know 'em all...
...The boys used the train ride to outline their act...
...By 1913 New York too was his...
...By then Jolson had already incorporated "You Made Me Love You" into his show...
...Al steadily improved until after New Year's, when he suffered a bad relapse...
...Silent movies were a thing of the past...
...I think you're really on the level about it...
...Likewise did this happen in legitimate theater...
...Roughly seven out of ten printed references to Al Jolson concern The Jazz Singer, the world's first commercially successful full-length talking movie...
...Jolson surrounded himself with "yes men" and cronies...
...Although the medium was later vilified for insulting the black race, Jolson's blackface was probably more of a theatricalization than a caricature...
...The marriage was agreed to quickly, and both Peri and Hessi came to the United States...
...Now, Mama...
...Al was 27 at the time—the king of the Winter Garden and, practically, the king of Broadway...
...Others answered that the tallis was Al's way of reaffirming his religious beliefs...
...She giggles...
...Al's job was in the laundry, feeding shirts through a wringer...
...A son comes to a father...
...He can't think of one human being in all the world who has treated him like a human being, not one who has shown him sympathy or affection, and he is just about ready to give up the battle of life in despair, brokenhearted over cruel fate, when he thinks of his 'Mammy' and the soul in him cries out for her...
...America was his world, not his father's, an ego identification that gave him confidence far beyond his years...
...Even after two more weeks of rehearsals Al still lacked confidence...
...to strive for...
...The sketch was crude by any standards, the Joelsons having stolen most of the lines from old burlesque acts...
...Shubert" to restore the old order of things, but the quote contains a psychological truth...
...At the time the shooting started, in October 1945, The Jolson Story was a black-and-white production budgeted at SI...
...Al did at least a half-dozen takes of every song...
...When Al heard it, he said it was just what he needed, and the three tired songwriters almost laughed themselves to sleep...
...James Francis Dooley, a blackface monologuist on the bill, suggested that Al do his part in blackface...
...I'll give it back to you some day, too...
...The Joelsons' contribution to this genre of unpublished dramatic literature was "The Hebrew and the Cadet," with Harry as "Mr...
...Don't you know me...
...The hammering continued, but it made no difference...
...Cohen," an East Side ghetto Jew and Al as "Meyer," the young "straight" man...
...Parks worked hard at miming to the songs...
...A cantor as well as a rabbi, Moshe endeavored to teach his sons to sing the prayers...
...She answers, "No, 1 wouldn't—") Well, with me it's all right...
...In short, a man-boy, full of seeming contradictions and haunted by the specter of his mother's death...
...The more one-night stands he played, the better Jolson liked it...
...The buckets were for Al to vomit in when he came off the stage...
...Sidney Skolsky, the producer of the film, noticed that Al hummed a tune whenever he was waiting to hear a playback...
...The house comes to tumultuous attention...
...They were in the country for about nine months when Naomi was confined to bed...
...Washington was interesting, but Seredzius seemed like a long-lost paradise when Asa and Hirsch had to pray, study or sing with their father...
...for there is no one to hold his scepter...
...She giggles "Yes" off mike...
...Al sang several of his old numbers—"It All Depends on You," "I'm Sitting on Top of the World," ' 'The Spaniard That Blighted My Life," "Golden Gate," "Keep Smiling at Trouble" and a new one titled, "There's a Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder...
...Asa Yoelson grew up in that moment— probably as much as he would ever grow up...
...Parts of two of Al's ribs and a large section of his left lung were removed in a long operation on January 16, 1945...
...The audience was a replacement for his mother Naomi, and if Jolson made love to them, it must be remembered that he had a huge Oedipus complex...
...And when he cried "Mammy," it was in appreciation, not in lament...
...Ho, Jakie...
...And it would have to be fought for...
...Jolson was never a religious Jew...
...Joelson, Palmer & Joelson wanted to have cards printed, but found the name "Joelson" was too large for the design they had in mind...
...He had never traveled alone, but the idea of a trip to New York held no terrors for him...
...When the show folded, he returned home...
...To sit and feel the lift of Jolson's personality is to know what the coiners of the word "personality" meant...
...Shooting was begun again—in color—and Jolson went back to the recording studio...
...No, 1-1") What d'ya mean, no...
...Jack is reinstated as the star of the show and sings "Mammy" (see p. 23) as his mother looks on from the front torn of the theater...
...Despite his obvious successes, Jolson was not yet a full "star" in the sense of having his name billed above the title...
...The "bad spot"—tuberculosis—that had plagued Jolson since 1900 was finally gone...
...The theory most commonly advanced has his style of full-throated singing falling out of favor with the rise of crooners like Bing Crosby...
...Those informal performances gave Al Jolson his first taste of applause and the indescribable thrill of knowing he had pleased his listeners...
...Later in the year Jolson appeared in The Honeymoon Express, which played the Belasco Theater in Washington, D.C...
...The film is a museum piece, at best, with tinny sound and make-up that makes Al look like an actor in The Rocky Horror Picture Show...
...The Joelson brothers became theater habitues, using the dimes thrown at them to purchase tickets to shows at the National, Washington's leading theater, where the top New York attractions played en tour...
...The power of that yearning, coupled with the snugly rhyming couplets of the lyric, made the song a standard...
...In 1915, Al was back in Washington at the Belasco with Dancing Around...
...Al's professional decline would soon begin, but no one would have dreamed it in the fall of 1928...
...Lusher, better and more updated arrangements were provided by George Duning and the rest of the Columbia music department...
...Yes, we're gonna ride on the shoot-the-chutes, and, you know, in the Dark Mill...
...The spelling of Al's last name underwent a change at this time...
...By the end of that week, Jolson was "made" in San Francisco...
...Al ran down the center aisle to the stage...
...Al tried blackface at the next performance, and there was an air of spontaneity about him, as if he actually enjoyed his work...
...Broke and hungry, he was forced to take Al to their Uncle Chaym's house in Yonkers...
...And I'm gonna buy you a nice black silk dress, Mama...
...It was past midnight in Atlantic City (Al was calling from Hollywood...
...Gait...
...Reeves was Jolson's idol and, in some respects, his model...
...His face blackened with burnt cork instead of whitened by the cold, and wearing white gloves instead of black stockings on his hands, he would drop to one knee before his "mammy...
...Shut your eyes, Mama...
...Jolson employed the successful theatrical trick of singing on one knee as early as 1913...
...You ain't heard nothin' yet...
...The Singing Fool was even more successful than The Jazz Singer...
...Oh, darlin', will you give me something...
...Al received a phone call from Jack Cohn of Columbia Pictures...
...Shubert to restore the old order of things...
...Harry suggested Al do a musical version of an old racing story...
...In the second chorus, where the music gives 16 bars to "Ma-am-my, ma-am-my," Al interpolated "Mammy, look at me...
...His friends—including Al and Harry—took turns helping...
...The show opened at the Winter Garden on January 7, 1925...
...On his return home, Jack sings to his beloved mother 'left...
...In truth, it was a clear clue to the man's self-doubts and insecurities...
...Wearing burnt cork, he told Al, was like wearing a mask...
...For an hour, he remained in a deserted alley, staring into space and trembling...
...From now on, he felt, the love his mother had given him would have to come from somewhere else—from outside of the family...
...Al was then 11...
...Al Jolson, for all his tough, earthy exterior, would remain an emotional child for the rest of his life—a self-assured braggart who was terrified of being alone, a sentimentalist with a heart of gold who made life miserable for most of those around him, and a lothario who chased, conquered and, in turn, ignored young women...
...A new contract with the Shuberts guaranteed him S2,500 a week for the next five years, with 15 to 25 percent of gross receipts...
...I'm your little baby...
...for the next three years, Al lived in that world, but was barely able to support himself, sometimes returning to Washington when he was broke...
...Asa was no longer withdrawn...
...Asa had only a dim memory of his father and did not want to leave Seredzius...
...The Shuberts were determined to present Al Jolson in a musical comedy with a tighter plot than the extravaganzas and with a complete score by one set of composers...
...The method was effective but uncomfortable, and both Asa and Hirsch disliked it...
...Griffith, however, feared the story's "racial" (Jewish) theme...
...And American Jewry suffers as well—and I must psychologically inform you of the great inspiration that Al was to the Jewish people in the last forty years...
...You see if I don't...
...Those mental pictures describe Jolson in the spring of 1913...
...Largely because of Al's tremendous war work, the request was granted...
...Moshe, although not vindictive, was relieved that his son's "stage madness" was finally over...
...Al liked women of all backgrounds, except Jewish women, whom he put on pedestals and left alone...
...For the performances that President Woodrow Wilson and his fiancee, Mrs...
...Shortly after Asa arrived home from Hebrew school to find his mother screaming on that February night in 1895, Naomi died...
...The bond between Al Jolson and "the boys" in uniform is not hard to understand...
...Mammy," there is no doubt, was Naomi...
...A southern Negro Boy who has found life a bitter and terrible tragedy, who has been broken, abused, and who is down and out without a ray of hope left...
...One of the performers later found Al backstage in the Belasco's service elevator...
...Al never pleaded with an audience, and he never asked for sympathy...
...On Jolson's 57th birthday, May 26, 1943, a contract was signed giving Columbia film rights to the life story of Al Jolson for a five-year period...
...During one of his performances, the workers' hammering almost drowned out Al's big voice...
...For in 1910\he Jewish people who emigrated from Europe to come here were a sad lot...
...He remained, however, an extremely lonely man who constantly sought motion in an effort to escape his feelings of aloneness...
...Although he slept with scores of women, Al could never touch a Jewish girl or woman...
...Asa was his mother's favorite child...
...In time, the blackfaced Jolson would display an elan on the Broadway stage no other performer—black or white—would dare exhibit...
...Al felt his mother had been dealt the final insult—being replaced by another woman...
...The plot concerned a boy who runs away from home to seek a career on the stage, but returns to take his dying father's place as cantor on the evening of Yom Kippur, the sacred Day of Atonement...
...Such a giving-olT of vitality, personality, charm and whatever all those words are...
...they tended to remind him of his mother...
...For years to come, Al Jolson would tour more often, and more willingly, than any other star in the American musical theater...
...The scene chosen was the one in which the young man returns to his parents' house and accompanies himself on the piano in the parlor...
...I thought you'd make an exception...
...on Monday evening, January 31, 1921, and for the remainder of the tour stopped the show with it...
...Jolson was synonymous with victory—at the race track, at the ball game, at anything that he participated in, he would say, ' 'I had the winner, ha ha, why didn't you ask me...
...When Al refused to give his name, they brought him to St...
...At dinner together, he showed Al one he was about to publish...
...Mary's was not a reform school, but neither was it merely an orphan asylum...
...You must have been good," his father told him...
...And I'm gonna get you a nice pink dress that'll go with your brown eyes...
...I want something for a goal...
...For some unknown reason, Al left the circus and ended up in Baltimore, where the Gerry Society, a reform organization, found him working in a bar...
...She asks, "What...
...He launches into another chorus of "Blue Skies...
...He was right," Chaplin remembered...
...Never again— until, perhaps, The Jolson Story was released in 1946—would he know anything approaching the popularity that had come his way with The Singing Fool...
...He also had a predictable weakness for mother songs...
...But Moshe, Hessi and the children were conspicuously absent...
...The film ended (with Al singing "Mammy") to applause that reached a climax with the audience demanding "Jolson, Jolson, Jolson...
...By the end of 1895 the Joelson boys were in full rebellion—staying out with the gang instead of coming home after school, getting into fights, running afoul of their sister Rose, and otherwise coming into conflict with the ideals of their father...
...Asa did not have any dark mittens, so a pair of Rose's black stockings had been drawn over his hands...
...The old practice of interpolating numbers, often without rhyme or reason, was abandoned, and "extravaganzas," like the ones Jolson had starred in, began to look old-fashioned in the new world of George Gershwin and Vincent Youmans...
...The story of The Jtn Singer contains parallels to Jol son's own life...
...Jolson did not write "Mr...
...The New York Daily Mews gave it four stars, and Howard Barnes of the New York Herald-Tribune said that only the deaf could "fail to be enchanted by the musical numbers, from 'By the Light of the Silvery Moon' or 'Swanee' to 'Liza!' " On October 23, 1950, at the age of 64, Al Jolson died of a heart attack in San Francisco...
...The story then made the rounds of the major studios, but no one felt the subject would appeal to a national, non-Jewish audience...
...He was banging his head against the padded walls...
...His colleagues called this the supreme manifestation of the Jolson ego...
...The Shuberts, producers of many of Jolson's musicals, finally gave Al star billing...
...The postcard read "New York," so Al made plans to go there and find Harry...
...He teased, cajoled and thrilled them, in the manner of a great violinist or lover...
...Nineteen twenty-four was a key year in the development of the American musical theater...
...Joe was confined to a wheelchair, and had to be washed, fed, dressed and helped onto toilet seats...
...Al Jolson's career really began in the summer of 1896, when the Joelson boys became street entertainers at the urging of their friends...
...The old man had won again...
...There was one who loved him, one whose arms are open to him, one who is ready to comfort him, and the thought gives him renewed faith in life and in the future...
...Bornstein was a dapper dresser who greeted everyone he knew with "How's your mother...
...The Lithuanian-born immigrant was acting out the typical American fantasy—running away from home to join the circus...
...Now get this...
...Jolson was known primarily as a singing comedian, but his first song in Sinbad in 1918 was a ballad...
...Yes, you'll wear pink or else...
...Al and his brother Harry discussed the situation...
Vol. 13 • November 1988 • No. 8
