IF YOU KNEW EDDIE...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 946, 27 September 1957, Page 30

IF YOU KNEW EDDIE...

‘THE special appeal of an ageing, pop-eyed comedian named Eddie Cantor is said to be that he sells yesterday. It certainly wasn’t this morning that we saw him in Roman Scandals, as the frightened food-taster of an eminently poisonable Roman emperor, yet he can still draw the crowds. An audience increasingly middle-aged remembers him affectionately as the troubadour of the twenties and thirties. With a repertoire of treacly songs, he recalls for them the warm, hazy, ever-so-pleasant years when they were young and phonographs were wound by hand. Cantor’s career stretches back to some indefinite date before 1910, but it was not till near the end of World War I when he joined the Ziegfield Follies that he became a name on Broadway By the twenties he was jostling Al Jolson for the first position, edging ahead at one point when Old Gold cigarettes paid him 7500 dollars for an advertising spot. Records of his songs, such as "Dinah" and "If You Knew Susie," rapidly became best-sellers, and the 220,000 dollars Cantor received for his five-year recording contract put him in the same class as John McCormack and Caruso. By the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, he was a millionaire five times over. Never fond of criticism, Cantor once declared that every New York radio critic except one was either a chiseler or a log-roller. The reservation "except one" failed to help him, however, when he was sued jointly by two New York radio critics for the sum of 100,000 dollars. He finally settled out of court. Like many stage performers, particularly of his era, Cantor is not noticeably modest. Taking part with one of his five daughters in a television programme, he is alleged to have stood by unembarrassed while she delivered such lines as, "Well, Daddy, I hope I turn out to be one-tenth the performer and one-twentieth the human being that you’ve always been." Though his film star has declined somewhat since the thirties, Cantor was still entertaining U.S. television audiences last year with a mixture of his old favourites and his Chaplinesque comedy. His slight build and cornered expression allow him the perennial role of the little man perpetually in trouble. ; Even Hollywood rarely honours an entertainer by filming his "life" while he still lives, but Cantor has been given that treatment. In Warner Brothers’ movie of The Eddie Cantor Story, however, he did not play himself. That part went to Keefe Brasselle, a younger man whose acting talents include the ability to get himself shot while showing most of the whites of his eyes. The film’s soundtrack was in part original material. Eddie Cantor recorded the songs himself, and it is these which listeners will hear shortly in the NZBS Theatre of Music. The numbers include "If You Knew Susie," "Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me," "Makin’ Whoopee," and "How Ya Gonna Keep "Em Down on the Farm?" (Theatre of Music: The’ Eddie Cantor Story, YAs, 3YZ, 4YZ, Goaturdav. October 5. 8.0 v.m.)