Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [35]
In the male ranks, suburban New Trier High School has produced Roy Fitzgerald – somewhat better known as Rock Hudson – Hugh (Wyatt Earp) O’Brian, and Charlton Heston. Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine’s younger brother, served his apprenticeship at Northwestern. It may be reaching a bit to call Marlon Brando a Chicago product. But he did live in Evanston and Libertyville, where he was an acting enthusiast and trackman (with, we assume, a torn T-shirt). Marlon comes by his acting skill naturally: his mother was once a fine community-theater actress.
Among ex-Chicago box-office bait on Broadway there are Cornelia Otis Skinner, Geraldine Page, Richard Kiley, Tom Bosley, Bob Fosse, Carol Lawrence, and former Northwestern songwriters Jule (Gypsy) Styne and Sheldon (Fiorello!) Harnick. Styne has not so far had Harnick’s good fortune in sharing a Pulitzer Prize. But his shows – High Button Shoes, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Peter Pan, The Bells Are Ringing, and others – have won virtually ever)’ other award in the field.
Vocalists? Mel Torme, Johnny Desmond, Joni James, and Frankie Laine are only a few of Chicago’s graduates. Frankie, who as Frank LoVecchio was a choirboy at Immaculate Conception Church on North Park Avenue, adopted his high school’s name, Lane, plus an “i,” as his own. He has never forgotten Chicago. At the height of his popularity, when “Lucky Old Sun,” “Mule Train,” and other Laine recordings were selling to the tune of eight million copies in three years, he came back home to play a special benefit for his old parish church. Among the distinguished Chicago bandsmen are David Rose, Gene Krupa, Muggsy Spanier, and Benny Goodman. Gene, one of nine little Krupas, recalls taking his bride to a honeymoon apartment where they lived in a bedroom while fellow jazzmen Eddie Condon, Red McKenzie, and Pee Wee Russell slept in the living room. Muggsy, whose family bankroll was practically nonexistent, developed his trumpet style at the age of fourteen, sitting on a curb outside the Pekin Café, where such jazz artists as King Oliver and Satchmo Armstrong blew hot. Benny, the eighth of eleven children, took his first lessons in a West Side synagogue which furnished the band instruments. Later he took lessons at Hull House, and from Chicago Symphony clarinetist Franz Schoepp.
A little-known point of jazz history is that Benny Goodman’s size determined his future. As Benny recalls it: “When the three of us went to the synagogue classes together for the first time, my brother Harry got a tuba because he was the biggest. Freddie got a trumpet. I was the smallest; I got a clarinet. If I had been twenty pounds heavier and two inches taller, I probably would be playing a tuba in some band today!”
Offstage and backstage, you will find such experts in their fields as producer Hal Wallis and Oscar-winning fashion designer Helen Rose, both ex-Chicagoans. And there, too, you will find Mr. Cartoon himself, Walt Disney. Walt, a native Chicagoan who later spent several years in Missouri, still has a warm feeling for Our Town: He studied here at McKinley High School and took night courses at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. And he worked here as a post-office employee and a rush-hour el train conductor. (Never sneer at a motorman – he may be heading for Fame and Fortuneland.)
Nor could this recital end without proper homage to the great Chicago-produced comedians and radio-TV stars.
Ever since the “good old days” of burlesque, Chicago always has been a major springboard for funny men. One of my favorites is my good friend from Waukegan, Jack Benny. (Actually, though he grew up in Waukegan, which named a junior high school for him not long ago, he was born in Chicago itself, where his mother was shopping when the time came to enter a hospital.) For years Jack returned to the city regularly to visit his father, who is now dead. He’s still