Read Online Audition by Barbara Walters - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Barbara Walters
Tags: Fiction, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Editors; Journalists; Publishers, Entertainment & Performing Arts
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regret every harsh word I said to her. Why didn’t I take my sister to the movies on a Saturday afternoon? There I was, her younger sister, with everything. And there was Jackie—with so little. The phone rang for me, but never for her. Friends came to see me, but not her. I even got her clothes. As Jackie and I grew older, she grew plumper, and if the new clothes my mother bought for her didn’t fit, I got them. Why didn’t she hate me? I don’t know. But she never did.
If conditions at home were difficult, conditions on Broadway and Forty-eighth street were not. The New York Latin Quarter opened on April 22, 1942, four months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and we entered World War II. The government started rationing gas, and we were issued ration cards for food. We even had blackout nights when we pulled down our shades and turned down the lights in case an enemy plane flew over the city. That would seem to have been an inauspicious time to launch a nightclub, but the reality was quite the opposite. The opulent fantasy world my father had created—red-velvet-lined walls, a thickly quilted pink ceiling, fountains spouting colored water, mirrors on the staircase, and indirect lighting seeping through ostrich feathers—turned out to be the perfect antidote to the harsh, wartime world outside the club’s mauve double doors. In its first year, the standing-room-only club grossed $1.6 million, a huge number in those days.
The Saturday Evening Post noted the phenomenon a year after the Latin Quarter opened: “It became one of the most amazing operations in Broadway history and no one could figure out how Walters had done it.” My father knew, of course. And he didn’t hesitate to share his formula in one magazine article after another.
“Everything in a nightclub should be a little bit better than you can afford,” he said, describing the club’s opulent decor. As for the customers: “Fill them full of food and take their breath away. Don’t let them relax and feel normal for a minute. The man who goes to a nightclub goes in the spirit of splurging, and you’ve got to splurge right along with him.”
What made the Latin Quarter’s success a true phenomenon was its success in the face of great competition. In this pre-TV era of nightclubs, the Latin Quarter was just one of many famous clubs in New York. There was, first and foremost, the Copacabana, owned, it was said, by the Mob. (The Mafia had nothing to do with the Latin Quarter. The Mob was very active in Las Vegas, but my father, remember, had come from Boston and started as a small-time booking agent. Their paths had not crossed. He had no dealings with these men and barely knew them when he opened his nightclubs. I used to joke, sometimes, that I wish he had known them because we would have been a lot richer.) The Copa was in the basement of a hotel just off Fifth Avenue and always hazy from cigarette smoke. But it had the most beautiful line of girls, the celebrated “Copa girls.” They could barely dance, but they didn’t have to. They just smiled and walked slowly and looked gorgeous. The Copa would later be the nightclub where a hilarious young comedy team, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, played season after season to packed houses.
Then there was the ever-so-chic Stork Club—no dancing girls, but nearly impossible to get into. The much-feared gossip columnist who had first noticed and written about my father, Walter Winchell, had his own table there every night. There was also the exclusive, high-society El Morocco, with its signature zebra-patterned banquettes and its powerful maître d’ who kept customers waiting for hours behind a velvet rope while he let in celebrities like Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart. El Morocco had dancing but no show; the famous patrons were the show. Billy Rose’s famous Diamond Horseshoe was my father’s main competition because it, too, had a big show and chorus girls.
What set the Latin Quarter apart
If conditions at home were difficult, conditions on Broadway and Forty-eighth street were not. The New York Latin Quarter opened on April 22, 1942, four months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and we entered World War II. The government started rationing gas, and we were issued ration cards for food. We even had blackout nights when we pulled down our shades and turned down the lights in case an enemy plane flew over the city. That would seem to have been an inauspicious time to launch a nightclub, but the reality was quite the opposite. The opulent fantasy world my father had created—red-velvet-lined walls, a thickly quilted pink ceiling, fountains spouting colored water, mirrors on the staircase, and indirect lighting seeping through ostrich feathers—turned out to be the perfect antidote to the harsh, wartime world outside the club’s mauve double doors. In its first year, the standing-room-only club grossed $1.6 million, a huge number in those days.
The Saturday Evening Post noted the phenomenon a year after the Latin Quarter opened: “It became one of the most amazing operations in Broadway history and no one could figure out how Walters had done it.” My father knew, of course. And he didn’t hesitate to share his formula in one magazine article after another.
“Everything in a nightclub should be a little bit better than you can afford,” he said, describing the club’s opulent decor. As for the customers: “Fill them full of food and take their breath away. Don’t let them relax and feel normal for a minute. The man who goes to a nightclub goes in the spirit of splurging, and you’ve got to splurge right along with him.”
What made the Latin Quarter’s success a true phenomenon was its success in the face of great competition. In this pre-TV era of nightclubs, the Latin Quarter was just one of many famous clubs in New York. There was, first and foremost, the Copacabana, owned, it was said, by the Mob. (The Mafia had nothing to do with the Latin Quarter. The Mob was very active in Las Vegas, but my father, remember, had come from Boston and started as a small-time booking agent. Their paths had not crossed. He had no dealings with these men and barely knew them when he opened his nightclubs. I used to joke, sometimes, that I wish he had known them because we would have been a lot richer.) The Copa was in the basement of a hotel just off Fifth Avenue and always hazy from cigarette smoke. But it had the most beautiful line of girls, the celebrated “Copa girls.” They could barely dance, but they didn’t have to. They just smiled and walked slowly and looked gorgeous. The Copa would later be the nightclub where a hilarious young comedy team, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, played season after season to packed houses.
Then there was the ever-so-chic Stork Club—no dancing girls, but nearly impossible to get into. The much-feared gossip columnist who had first noticed and written about my father, Walter Winchell, had his own table there every night. There was also the exclusive, high-society El Morocco, with its signature zebra-patterned banquettes and its powerful maître d’ who kept customers waiting for hours behind a velvet rope while he let in celebrities like Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart. El Morocco had dancing but no show; the famous patrons were the show. Billy Rose’s famous Diamond Horseshoe was my father’s main competition because it, too, had a big show and chorus girls.
What set the Latin Quarter apart
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