Eddie Cantor died little more than a generation ago, and yet his films are already like yellowed photographs - what Dylan Thomas called "the dicky-bird-watching pictures of the dead".In his musical numbers, often done in blackface, he slapped his gloved hands together and skipped from foot because he never learned to dance. The aptly-called "banjo eyes" rolled in mock horror. How dire it would be, he sand, if we knew Susie like he knew Susie. When he left the stage, he still skipped, and trailed a handkerchief like a galvanised Pavorotti. The author of this new biography admits that such one time hit films as Whoopee and Kid Boots have not worn well. Cantor has shared a common fate with other top-liners of the Ziegfeld Follies, who are often now famous for having once been famous: Will Rogers, the rope twirling philosopher who never met a man he didn't like, Marilyn Miller, who looked for the silver lining, Fanny Brice who became the "Funny Girl" when a nose came along that was even more Cyrano-esque than hers, and Leon Errol and Walter Catlett, who ended up, respectively, playing leads in B movies and bit parts in A movies.Banjo Eyes is subtitled "Eddie Cantor and the Birth of Modern Stardom". He was, so Herbert G. Goldman argues, a phenomenon: the first performer to place an aspect of his private life before an audience - a radio audience, as it happened. As middle age dented the image of the spunky Jewish kid proving that chutzpah was what counted, Cantor became the harassed "real life father trying to marry off his five daughters". (The five daughters did no appreciate the joke.)Until then, so Mr Goldman claims, a star existed only on stage or on film or the airwaves; privately, he or she had no more perceived existence than a light bulb when the ice box door was shut. Mind, years previously Fanny Brice had put her private life n show when , with the torch song My Man, lifted from Mistinguett, she bled all over the New Amsterdam stage, the "man" being her jailed gambler husband, Nicky Arnstein.Cantor could be said to have inspired not only Jack Benny's cod reputation as a tightwad, but the running gag of his fake feud with Fred Allen, much as Bob Hope would later pretend to be jealous of Bing Crosby. And Cantor became a tireless worker for charity, doting on Roosevelt and the New Deal. He founded the March of Dimes, which still thrives, and raised vast sums for the new state of Israel. He waded into the anti-Semitic priest, Charles E. Coughlin, who described Roosevelt as a "scab president" and the New Deal as the "Jew deal". In 1939, Coughlin received a fan mail of a million letters and cards a week. When Cantor attacked him as "anti-Christian", the comic's radio sponsor's cut him adrift.
Business - especially showbiz - is business.It is perhaps going too far to suggest that Cantor changed the very nature of stardom. Even today, most performers take the money and go home, and one feels that Mr Goldman is attempting an apologia for a showbiz biography that is as familiar as boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl. The cliches come thick, but not nearly fast enough.Cantor was born Israel Iskowitz in an East Side ghetto in 1892. His mother died when he was not yet two; his father decamped, leaving the child to be reared by his devoted grandmother, Esther. He became a petty thief, and in a street battle his forehead was badly marked. Later, when he had become Izzy Kanter, than Eddie Kanter, and finally Eddie Cantor, he used make up to cover the scar - not a bad metaphor for his stage names. At a summer camp, where slum kids were offered fresh air, baseball and swimming, he discovered the beginnings of what a later entertainer would elsewhere describe as "a talent to amuse".He met a girl named Ida Tobias whose steadfastness was the making of him. Her father, a businessman, believed that all actors were bums, which, for a time, Cantor undoubtedly was. He learned his craft and painstakingly developed a stage persona, playing whatever dates he could get on the vaudeville circuits and saving his money. When he at last had a sizeable nest egg, he and Ida were married, and Mr Goodman charts the slow climb upwards with a dedicated sloppiness.In a photograph, Cary Cooper is described as Cary Grant. The name of the character actor Berton Churchill is mis-spelled. On Page 30 we are told that as part of his act Cantor "wore clothes a size or two too small so as to increase the impression of slightness", and on Page 44 we read that he "wore plain clothes two or three sizes too tight in order to the increase the impression of slightness" (One would have thought, even without the repetition, that too tight clothes would have had the opposite effect). On Page 183, the young Deanna Durbin sings Il Bacio and "the applause from the studio audience was overwhelming". Two pages later she sings it gain, this time on stage and, predictably, "the applause was overwhelming". Hilariously, we read of the honeymooning Eddie and Ida in London, going to the "chic" Lyons Corner House. Vic Oliver, an Austrian, is "an American comedian", and Joe Frisco, a vaudeville comedian, whose trademark was a stutter, is described as a dancer.Wending one's way through those literary cowpats, we follow Cantor's career to and beyond the Ziegfeld Follies - there is what is quaintly described as a "stageography". In the Wall Street crash of 1929, he not only lost a fortune of $5,000,000, but owed another $285,000 - ten million by today's standards. As ever, Ida was his mainstay; with her encouragement, he promptly wrote a book about going broke. It sold half a million copies.His best years - the Thirties - lay ahead.
There were films and radio. He was a devoted husband and father, although the rumours went that he had fleeting affairs with Ziegfeld girls - showbiz prerequisites, some might say. And, while making a film, he seems to have had been seriously involved with an angular slapstick comedienne named Joan Davis, who would end her career in the TV sitcom, I married Joan; Ida remained a homebody.His eldest and most adoring daughter died in 1959. Ida followed, and Eddie Cantor, with his anchors gone, died a year later. He left $319,000 - not much, considering. He had given some of his money to charity, but was also the victim of bad advisers. He should have entrusted his affairs to the all wise Ida. The Yiddisher Momma always knew best.