Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [34]
hearing Newhart only once, I was convinced he should play at an upcoming local Emmy Awards dinner at which I was to preside. He did (the president has some power), and was off like his submarine Codfish which, as his admirers know, shelled Miami Beach – in the off-season. Newhart showed his gratitude to Sorkin by making him a regular on the Bob Newhart NBC-TV show.
So rapid was Newhart’s rise that he and State Street merchant Joel Goldblatt, for whom Bob had been a fifty-dollar-a-week cigar salesman two Christmases earlier, couldn’t resist indulging in some good-natured badinage at a Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine dinner not long ago. Bob had attended Loyola, but it was the first time the two had met. Reminded of Newhart’s cigar-counter experience, Joel quipped: “We can use you again this Christmas – and we’ll up the salary to seventy-five.”
Dick Gregory, another ex-Chicagoan, was also talent-scouted by a broadcaster, newsman Alex Dreier. Dick has known lean days – times were so hard that his family was on relief. But he ran his way to a track scholarship at Southern Illinois University, and then ran on to comedy stardom with an engagement at Chicago’s Playboy Club. After Dick appeared on the Jack Paar show and won nation-wide acclaim, his home town of St. Louis gave him the key to the city. “But,” cracked Gregory, who is still snubbed by many there because of his color, “then they changed the locks!”
Why have all these fresh talents received their big break in Chicago? For a reason which many Broadway producers still haven’t fathomed because it doesn’t fit in with their stereotyped ideas of Chicago. Because our theater audiences are tremendously discriminating. We won’t support the hackneyed or the second-rate. We demand what is new, fresh, and first-rate. When we get it, we finance it. We encourage it with our attendance and approval.
“People are always asking where the new comedians are coming from,” wrote New York Herald-Tribune drama critic Walter Kerr, himself a former Chicago suburbanite who taught at Northwestern University. “They’re coming from Chicago. Coming? They’re here.”
But there is much more to the Chicago entertainment beat. Through the branching out of our home-grown personalities, it stretches to Hollywood, to Broadway, and beyond.
Start in Hollywood, with the first stop the glamour department, where many consider today’s number one vamp to be slim Kim Novak, the gorgeous Wright Junior College alumna whose Hollywood career has been nothing short of meteoric. The first time I saw Kim she was a leggy addition to a parade of models in a fashion shop on West Madison. During an intermission I happened to stroll backstage. There was Kim, reading a book, as part of her school homework. Now, long since her “discovery,” she still has a scholarly bent – she quietly earned a degree in her spare time at Los Angeles City College. She is also the homebody type (every home should have such a body!). On Chicago visits, she shuns bright lights to stay on the Northwest Side with her parents or in Aurora with her sister, Mrs. Arlene Malmberg. Her attractive aide and traveling companion is her former Farragut High School friend, Barbara Mellon.
Another ex-Chicago favorite is Dorothy Lamour, the sarong girl herself. Dottie preceded such beauties from Chicago as Dolores Hart, Joan Tabor, Pamela Tiffin, ex-WGN “Blue Fairy” Brigid Bazlen, Myrna (“Miss USA”) Hansen,