Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [28]
Another home I think of with affection is the Beverly Hills mansion of Danny and Rosemarie Thomas. When they first moved in, it was a typical Spanish-style house. With each new success of Danny’s, they added another wing – until it became apparent that in time this would put the south bedroom somewhere over the Mexican border. Two things I doubt that any visitor to Danny’s home will ever forget: the religious figures throughout the house, of which a lighted statue of his patron saint, St. Jude, is noteworthy; and an immense wood carving of The Last Supper, which covers one wall of the dining room. The Thomases’ dining-room table, incidentally, is U-shaped and so arranged that nobody need turn his back to the wall on which the wood carving hangs. The carving and statuary are conspicuous and moving evidence of Danny’s devotion to his religion.
The better I become acquainted with leading show-business personalities, the more I discover that in private life they are usually very different from the public images they present. Frank Sinatra, for example, is generally thought of as a harum-scarum hedonist. Yet Frankie is one of the most generous of entertainers in helping people and causes in which he believes. When the girls’ school, Marymount College, moved from Hollywood to another Los Angeles suburb, the administration was astonished to receive a check for $100,000 from Sinatra. When Charlie Morrison, owner of the Mocambo on the Sunset Strip, died heavily in debt several years ago, Frankie played at the Mocambo for a week, gratis, to clear $50,000 for the widow Mary. During Lee J. Cobb’s lean years, Frankie was similarly generous. When Cobb became seriously ill in a strange town, Sinatra not only paid all his medical bills but also phoned him daily to cheer him up. Because Sinatra does his good deeds quietly, however, you seldom hear about them.
And although Marilyn Monroe was married to the brilliant playwright, Arthur Miller, many people still considered her a “dumb blonde.” Any amusing repartee attributed to her they dismissed as the concoction of ghost writers and press agents. As other reporters and I can testify, Marilyn was not only highly intelligent, but genuinely witty. Here is an excerpt from an exclusive interview I conducted with her several years ago in Chicago:
“They say you wear nothing underneath your dress but a garter belt. Why?”
“To hold up my stockings, silly boy.”
“Have you read Freud?”
“No, I’ll wait for the movie.”
“Will you hold still for a radio interview?”
“Certainly.”
“Mind if it runs about thirty minutes?”
“I don’t know you that well.”
Zsa Zsa Gabor is even faster with a quip than Marilyn – so much so that Bob Hope once told me she is one of the few women with whom he would hate to compete in an ad-lib contest. Last winter Zsa Zsa’s house was burned in the terrible canyon fires in California just a few days before she announced her engagement. I said to her, “Life moves fast for you, doesn’t it, Miss Gabor? One week you’re burned out of your home and the next week you’re engaged.”
Replied Zsa Zsa, “Dollink, maybe I’m not as burned out as everybody thought!”
Let us take a slow look at show business in my city.
Stated simply, The Prairie Giant is a glutton for entertainment. Chicagoans love show business in every form: drama, comedy, music, broadcasts, telecasts, night-club acts, the strip tease – you name it, we’ll go for it. And when an exciting new trend develops in any of the performing arts, there is a good chance that it originated in Chicago.
This interest of ours is no new phenomenon. Only four years after the city’s founding, our isolated, mud-splattered citizens opened their first theater – in a converted hotel dining room. (And now, more than a century and a quarter later, some of Chicago’s finest entertainment is still staged in a hotel atmosphere. Today we call it satirical revue.)
Chicago was the home of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., and Lillian Russell, and the hub of many music-hall and vaudeville