An Interview with Connie Sawyer - Part Two

Kliph Nesteroff: You were a regular on The Jack Carter Show, which was the lead-in on Saturday nights to Your Show of Shows. You were sort of the Imogene Coca to Jack Carter's Sid Caesar. Jack says that Imogene got all the press and that you were overshadowed.

Connie Sawyer: (sighs) Well, you know... I did ten pilots. None of them got picked up. You have to be lucky. I never got to be a star... although I never wanted to. I never would have been in show business had my mother not made me. She was born in Europe. She always said that if she had been born in America she would have been in show business. They were kosher Jews from Romania. Mama gave me dancing lessons and as a child she told me, "Get out of the kitchen. Go practice! Go practice!" 

Because I won that amateur contest and was making $250 a week in the era of the Depression - who the hell would quit? My brother got a job on a boat and went around the world playing the saxophone and the violin. He had a good ear and he could play anything. We both got in the biz - and stayed in it. Anyway, I was in Tamiment just after the Your Show of Shows crowd. I wasn't there with Max Liebman so, for me, it was bad timing. But what's the difference? Imogene Coca and I were friends. 

She came to my wedding. Jane Dulo was another girl comedienne and she was in a quite a lot of things. There was another act - Louise Howard and then there was Jean Carroll. As far as comediennes - that was it. To be a comedienne was tough in those days. Now look at it. My God, they write books and they come out of the closet and they're big headliners! I'm not saying that to be bitter. It's all timing. I really wanted to have children. Imogene Coca never had a child. 

Jane Dulo never had a child. They missed the whole meaning of what life is about. Here I am. I am ninety-nine years old. Almost one hundred. My daughter drove me into Hollywood this morning and I had an audition for a commercial. Last year I auditioned for one day's worth of work on the movie Due Date. These days you get a day. 

You work one day on a movie and that's it. I did the film The Way West in 1961 and we went to Oregon for sixteen weeks. The business is different today. I don't care if I don't get the part... well, maybe for ten minutes I'm upset. Maybe they know how old I am - and they get scared.

Kliph Nesteroff: I don't know much about Jane Dulo...

Connie Sawyer: She worked a lot. She was on McHale's Navy. She was in a lot of shows, but she's been dead for a long time. Smoking. Always smoking. We had a group of girls that would get together out here. We called ourselves the Show Buddies. 

It was The Kean Sisters, Jane and Betty, Giselle McKenzie, Betty Garrett... there were fourteen of us, but there are only five of us left. We would meet at somebody's house and laugh. It was sort of like Yarmy's Army - only those guys would go out and do shows. I couldn't get Jane Kean or Giselle or Betty Garrett to put on a show. They were too competitive with each other. We didn't do any shows. They were into their own thing and they were very hot in their own thing. We were just social. 

Kliph Nesteroff: I'm sure I've seen Jane Dulo thousands of times...

Connie Sawyer: But you didn't know who she was. Of course. Loads of people have seen me, you know, but they didn't know who I was. When I quit doing a single it was in London in 1956. I came back to New York and had two children. I didn't want to go on the road anymore and I just worked around New York in Come As You Are, Time of the Cuckoo and A Hole in the Head. I was covering Kay Medford and Lee Grant [as an understudy] and playing at the Blue Angel. 

Frank Sinatra's manager, Lillian Small, came to New York and saw the property [A Hole in the Head]. She called Frankie and said, "There's a play I think you should turn into a movie." He said, "Buy it." The guy that was the lead in the play was an anchorman who became an actor. It had a sad ending where the guy loses his son.

The brother and the sister-in-law come and take custody of the child. Anyway, Frankie bought it. Arnold Schulman said to Lillian Small when they were negotiating for the movie, "The girl that plays the drunk, Connie Sawyer, that's a shtick she created [at the try-outs] in Philadelphia. I didn't write that." Lillian Small called Frank Sinatra and told him. He said, "Bring the drunk." 

I told them I had two little children. I couldn't leave them in New York. Lillian called Sinatra. He said, "Bring the kids." I said, "Well, I'll have to bring the maid! Who's going to take care of the kids while I'm working!" Sinatra said, "Bring the maid." When I got on the set at the Goldwyn Studios, Sinatra announced, "This is Connie Sawyer! She plays the lady that gets drunk and screams, 'Geronimo.' You don't know what this broad did to me!" 

I loved Sinatra from that moment on. Whenever people would say to me, "I hear he's this, I hear he's that," I'd tell them, "Oh, he's great. He is what he is and he's marvelous. A wonderful, natural actor." So that was fun working with him. And then I did a film out here called Ada with Dean Martin and Susan Hayward. That's when I was getting good parts. Today I'm lucky if I get four lines.

Kliph Nesteroff: You said you did your final stand-up gig in London. It was a place called The Colony Club. What was that experience like?

Connie Sawyer: Oh, it was a beautiful club. Very chi-chi. They all came in tuxes and evening gowns. It was for the upper crust. I thought I would bomb there, but I didn't. I was the only act on the show and there was one show a night at midnight. They saw me at the Blue Angel and bought me. I didn't go right away.

 I got married and the booker saw my friend Louise play the Number One bar. I said, "Can she take my place?" He said, "Thank God I saw her act. Yes. But you know you'll never play anywhere in London until you play the Colony Club." I got married, got pregnant - then I got pregnant again. And he'd keep saying, "You'll never play London until you play my club." Finally I said, "I'm ready!" And I brought my two kids to London and played The Colony Club. That's when I said, "No more of this [going] on the road." We lived in Irvington on the Hudson. We had a red barn house.

I would play places like the Versailles and stuff like that, but I never went on the road again with the bands and all of that. Then the movies got me. I'm the only one left of that era. They're all dead! 

Kliph Nesteroff: (laughs)

Connie Sawyer: (laughs)   

An Interview with Connie Sawyer - Part One

Kliph Nesteroff: You were on the bill with Lord Buckley at a place called Club Cairo in Washington, October 1946.

Connie Sawyer: I wonder if it was a Chinese restaurant. I played everything in Washington. We would go there sometimes to break in a show in the old days. I started in San Francisco when I was seventeen. Straight out of high school. There was a radio station called KFRC. They think things like American Idol are new today, but we did those amateur shows years ago. I entered into this contest for the KFRC Variety Show and I won - and I got a contract. It was Al Pearce and his gang.

They did this show at KFRC and I was lucky. I always had a mentor and there was always someone to help me. There was a lady named Bea Benaderet who became a very famous actress. She said to me, "You should do an act because you are cute and funny." We found a kid and we put an act together and I started playing vaudeville and nightclubs around the East Bay area. I went to a nightclub in Los Angeles... it was on Fairfax...

Kliph Nesteroff: The Band Box?

Connie Sawyer: The Band Box! The Band Box! How do you remember that? Oh my God. Yes. I played The Band Box. I'm trying to think of the guy who owned it.

Kliph Nesteroff: Billy Gray.

Connie Sawyer: Yes and didn't he have a son that became famous? Joel Grey?

Kliph Nesteroff: No, I think Joel Grey was the son of Mickey Katz.

Connie Sawyer: Ah, yeah. That's it. Why do I get that all mixed up?

Kliph Nesteroff: When you did The Al Pearce Show in San Francisco - was Morey Amsterdam part of it?

Connie Sawyer: Yes, well, he would come in as a guest when he was married to Thelma something...

Kliph Nesteroff: Mabel Todd.

Connie Sawyer: Mabel Todd. God, you're better than me. They would come in as guests and that was the first time I ever met Morey Amsterdam. Later on in New York I did a show of his that did not last. Anyway, I was doing vaudeville in San Francisco and Oakland and Los Angeles. I played the Club Moderne in San Francisco and they had an emcee. A gay boy. He was marvelous. I had two girlfriends and they wanted to go to New York. I worked my way across the country. When I got to Pittsburgh and played a club, Gil Lamb was the comic and the emcee. He was an eccentric dancer. He said that I was the second coming of Fanny Brice. He said, "Your act is so corny, but you've got some talent there. I'm going to see if I can get William Morris to help you."

They sent somebody. They brought me into New York and they helped me find an act. Again I had another mentor. They said, "Before we place you in New York, we'll send you to the Mountains for the weekend." Who do you think the headliners were? Sophie Tucker and Joe E. Lewis. He drank quite a bit and I don't know how he ever worked. But he did and he was funny. He said, "You're going to open the show." I said, "I can't open the show! I'm not a dog act." I was going on nineteen. Well, I opened the show and they hated me. Talk about flop sweat. I did something very unprofessional. I wasn't getting any laughs and I said to the audience, "Why are you so mean to me! I'm Jewish!" I ran offstage. Can you imagine doing that? I thought, "Well, I've got to go home. I better go home." I was crying.

Sophie Tucker came into my dressing room after the show. She said, "Listen, kid. There's no excuse for what you did. But you've got something - and I'm going to help you." They helped me. She was with William Morris and they found a guy and I got an act together. I sent for my mother and she traveled with me for a little bit until I got everything together. Then my father said, "Send mama home. That's enough already." I started working around New York in all the East Side supperclubs. There was the Reuben Bleu, the Blue Angel and I did a revue at The Versailles with Leonard Sillman as the producer. Sure. Paul Lynde was the man comic, I was the girl comedienne, there was a dance team, y'know. They had a whole revue.

Kliph Nesteroff: Come As You Are.

Connie Sawyer: Yeah.

Kliph Nesteroff: How about Cafe Society in New York. March 1947. Run by a guy named Barney Josefson.

Connie Saywer: Yes! Cafe Society. There was one uptown and one downtown. I worked both. The blacklist was going on then and Barney had a brother who was a communist lawyer. Barney was a very sweet man and I had a crush on him. He used to say to me, "Would you go down here and do some kind of a number. They're having some sort of meeting." I would say, "Sure." All the kids that came to the meeting were people like Phil Leeds, Betty Garrett and Lee Grant. They'd ask you to sign a paper and I said, "I don't sign anything." My father used to tell me growing up! "Don't sign. You can get into trouble." I never signed. I should have been blacklisted. But I never was. I was lucky because I didn't sign. 

Kliph Nesteroff: I read that you were doing a bit titled You Too Can Be Beautiful about a Saks Fifth Avenue model.

Connie Sawyer: Yes. Bud Bernsen was a comedy writer. He sorta became like my manager. I would give him ten percent of my salary and he would keep feeding me new things. I liked him. He was a very nice man. Yeah, I became a headliner. There weren't very many comediennes in those days. There was Jean Carroll and she was like Bob Hope. She did stand-up jokes, jokes, jokes, jokes. Mine were more in sketch format. A beginning, a middle and an end. I worked all over and I worked in band shows. I was with Stan Kenton. I forget who the band was when I played the Capitol.

Kliph Nesteroff: I think you played it with Lionel Hampton. I have you down as sharing the bill at the Capitol with comedians Joey Adams and Al Kelly along with Lionel Hampton's Orchestra.

Connie Sawyer: That's it.

Kliph Nesteroff: How did you connect with Bud Bernsen.

Connie Sawyer: He was in the Brill Building. He was like a song plugger, but more of a writer. That was also the time that I first met Betty Garrett and we became friends all these years. She just died last year. She was ninety-two.

Kliph Nesteroff: Yes. I met her once with Esther Williams.

Connie Sawyer: Oh, you did? All the time I was doing an act in New York I was also studying with Uta Hagen. I wanted to be a character actress. During the summer I would play Tamiment where Your Show of Shows started. I loved it. They did sketches and things and it was wonderful training. There was another place in the mountains called Green Mansions where they did everything; revues, plays, ballet - everything. At Tamiment... I think I was with Joey Faye. Yes. Green Mansions I was with my favorite - Jack Gilford. I was at Green Mansions for two summers. 

This was all taking place long before the fifties. I remember at Tamiment we had a girl singer, Barbara Cook, a skinny little blonde whom I roomed with. She was eighteen and had a full voice. Lee Grant, an actress, was there. I remember when the summer was over, Barbara went and auditioned and got a musical. Lee went and auditioned and got Detective Story. And I went right back to saloons (laughs). I never seemed to get what I wanted, so I'd take a job. I got into the Actor's Studio because Jo Van Fleet was with me at Green Mansions. No one would room with her because she was like a prima donna - but what an actress! 

I had a little chihuahua that was part of a dog act and kinda trained. Ernest Glucksman said, "You'll have to room with Jo Van Fleet." I said, "I don't care." She got to be friends with me. She hated dogs, but she finally wound up loving the little chihuahua. I got into the Actor's Studio with her help and Danny Mann. Daniel Mann was a director, but he had also been a performer and they brought me up there. That's where I met Arthur Laurents. He wrote Time of the Cuckoo. He was a great director and he wrote Gypsy. Shirley Booth was doing Time of the Cuckoo and I became her understudy. At the same time I continued to do my act at The Blue Angel. I played The Blue Angel two or three or four times. They would always bring me back and I worked with many headliners.

Kliph Nesteroff: What do you recall about the Morey Amsterdam production you mentioned. It was called Hilarities.

Connie Sawyer: It was a flop. It didn't last very long. I don't know why it was a flop. It was a vaudeville show. It wasn't a play or a musical. The critics panned it. They didn't pan me. I remember. They said I was a very funny, pretty and cute comedienne. As an understudy I was allowed to take other work and learn my craft better. I worked in three shows with Shirley. She would say to her friends, "Let's go to the Blue Angel and see my understudy."

One night somebody knocked on the dressing room door and it was Katharine Hepburn - and I was always in there with Shirley, y'know. I never called her Shirley. It was always Ms. Booth. I said, "Ms. Booth! Katharine Hepburn!" She came in and said, "Shirley, you were wonderful in the show! How come you won't do the movie? They keep asking me to do the movie. I'm here to tell you I don't want to do the movie unless I hear it from your mouth." She said, "I just don't want to do it. I worked too many years to have the [live] audience love me." Two weeks later Hepburn came back and said, "Are you sure you don't want to do the show?" 

And Shirley said, "Do it, Katie. I don't want to do the film." She turned it down and Katharine did it and it was called Summertime. They changed the name. They went to Venice to shoot it. There was a scene in the movie where she is taking photos and she backs up and she falls into a canal. She didn't want a stunt lady - which was a big mistake. I guess they didn't know. The water was contaminated. She had trouble with her eye after that - all those years. True story.

Kliph Nesteroff: The Tamiment Resort, as you mentioned, was where the collective that became Your Show of Shows first came together - Max Liebman, Imogene Coca, Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner...

Connie Sawyer: Yes.

Kliph Nesteroff: Around the same time - 1948 - you did a TV show with Phil Silvers.

Connie Sawyer: I sure did! I loved Phil Silvers! Yes, I played all those shows with the comics. I was their lady. Carol Burnett later, later, later started like that. But there were not many comediennes in my era of the late thirties and forties. They didn't buy girl comics in those days. Then the War broke out and that helped me. I was on USO and toured the hospitals. I went to Trindad and Panama and we were supposed to go to Europe. We wound up back in Washington. Something happened and they brought our plane in. They don't tell you. Secrets, y'know. But they did me a favor. That's when they started buying me with the band shows. But, yeah, Phil Silvers.

Kliph Nesteroff: The television program was called The Phil Silvers Arrow Show.

Connie Sawyer: Yes, Arrow Shirts. I played in the sketches. One day I said to him, "I think I'm gettin' a crush on you." He said, "I like tall, skinny shiksa girls! Not little Jewish ladies!"

Kliph Nesteroff: (laughs)

Connie Sawyer: (laughs) I never forgot that. I laughed. You know I saw Phil many, many years later when he was sick. We were both Academy members. He was sitting in the back. He had been divorced and then married one of those gorgeous, tall shiksa girls. He wasn't well. I went and sat with him. 

He said, "I don't think I'm long for this world. I'm not feelin' real well, Connie." Two weeks later he passed on. But yes, I worked on that Phil Silvers show. And I worked with Bert Lahr. Bert Lahr, what a funny man. Wonderful man and very high strung. Nervous. Funny. I read the book that his son wrote and it was true. He was always very nervous. He never knew that he was good. How strange.

Kliph Nesteroff: Everyone thinks of Bert Lahr as a great burlesque comic, but he really crossed over when he did Waiting for Godot.

Connie Sawyer: Oh, he was wonderful! I went to see him in Waiting for Godot! I went backstage to say hello. I said, "I loved watching you! Wonderful! What the hell is this play about?" He said, "Don't ask me!" Years later I did an analysis on the play. A couple of women did it at Theater West and it was just as good with a pair of women as it was with men.

Kliph Nesteroff: What did you and Bert Lahr do together?

Connie Sawyer: We did a television show together with sketches. They would hire me for these things. I did the Colgate Comedy Hour with Eddie Cantor. I was at the Blue Angel and I was with William Morris. They told Eddie, "Go see our client." He said, "I'll go watch her. I don't like auditions, so I'm glad she's working somewhere." He was tough. I remember we did a blind man sketch. We meet on a blind date and neither of us can see very well. It was in very bad taste, but a very famous comedy writer wrote the sketch. They shot the Colgate Hour in both Los Angeles and New York. We shot my sketch with him in New York.

Kliph Nesteroff: The Phil Silvers Arrow Show - you were joined by a company that included Jack Gilford and Jerry Hausner.

Connie Sawyer: Yes, I remember Jerry. He did a lot of voice overs and I'd see him in Los Angeles when we both came out here. I went to dinner at his house.

Kliph Nesteroff: I have you down as having played a gig at the Blue Angel with Wally Cox.

Connie Sawyer: Oh, yeah, Wally. He was friends with Marlon Brando. Yeah and I had a crush on Marlon Brando. Who didn't? I was at Actor's Studio with him. What a wonderful actor. He and Wally were great pals.

Kliph Nesteroff: You played a gig in Portland at the Clover Club with the old film actor Roscoe Ates.

Connie Sawyer: Yeah, the guy who stuttered! Oh my God! I forgot all about that. Yes, I did. He was the headliner. Oh for goodness sakes.

Kliph Nesteroff: That seems like a weird gig. June 1949.

Connie Sawyer: Why I was sent there I do not remember. Perhaps the package belonged to the William Morris agency. I know I played Las Vegas in a William Morris package with the Marx Brothers. Chico gambled. Ugh. He'd lose everything. You couldn't get Harpo to put a nickel in the slot. The El Rancho. 

There were only a few nightclubs in Vegas then. It was still just desert. The Ritz Brothers were across the street. Down the street was another club that had the woman who wore the gloves - Hildegarde. That was in 1948, I think. Then they brought me to Los Angeles. You know where The Comedy Store is now? Well, it used to be Ciro's. I remember when I did Ciro's, this young girl used to come in. She was too young and she was gorgeous. She was sixteen and wasn't supposed to be there, but she'd come in. She was so beautiful. Her name was Elizabeth Taylor.

An Interview with Sol Weinstein

Sol Weinstein: I wrote for Jackie Kannon for years. My first television show was for Jerry Lester. I wrote for Joe E. Lewis for many, many years; A non-drinker with a boozer was an interesting symbiosis. Finally, I worked for Allan Drake. So if just by osmosis that makes me a member of the mafia, then perhaps I am. The whole thing was accidental. I had no idea who was dirty and who wasn't. I knew about Mo Levy. He had a sinister cast to him whenever he was mentioned. I knew about the connections... but I just wrote their jokes.

Kliph Nesteroff: How did you first connect with Jerry Lester and what was the show?

Sol Weinstein: The show was called The Jerry Lester Show. It was in 1961. I spent quite a long while as a newspaperman in Trenton, New Jersey for The Trentonian, a morning tabloid. I was writing jokes on the side. I was sending one-liners to comics. Every now and then I would find one who liked my style. I began to make more money than I was making working for The Trentonian. So I took a shot and got into the business full time. 

No guarantees of anything. It was strictly speculation. It worked out, ultimately. In 1961 I got my first television gig. I worked with a guy named Ron Friedman, a very clever guy, who I still have a connection with. And a young comic actor by the name of Ron Axe. A few years ago he took his life. He was a depressive and a very clever, young kid. He had a dark cloud over him, a depressive, and he ultimately offed himself. 

In 1961 there was Sol and the two Ronnies and we worked for a guy by the name of Jerry Lester. A real old time, old time. His whole approach was old time. Perhaps he hired three young writers to spice up his act. At any rate, we worked for Jerry and the show only lasted a few weeks. I don't know about his connections at all. I don't know if Jerry Lester was a Mob connected person or not. Many comics were. They did so to get gigs. 

I don't know what the pressures were, but some of them were connected. Allan Drake I know married a woman who was a Miss New Jersey and I think in a Miss America contest. She ended up being murdered. Her name was Janice. Allan Drake's real name was Allan Margulies. She and a guy by the name of Little Augie were shot down in some lonely area in either New York State or New Jersey. 

It was a Mob hit. Leaving Allan with a son named Michael who later became a musician. I met Allan Drake because I had met a lady in New York by the name of Laura Lane, who was a very good singer, became a friend of mine. She was working on the bill with Allan Drake, ergo I met him. After a while I was writing occasional jokes for him. 

Joe E. Lewis I met when I was working for The Trentonian. I used to send Joe E. Lewis reams of drunk jokes knowing nothing whatsoever about it because I didn't drink. I was sending all these jokes away and one day a cheque came for five hundred dollars and my wife went wacky. She had never seen so much money. That ultimately lead to me leaving The Trentonian. 

I ended up working for Joe E. Lewis from about 1956 to about 1970, the year he died. Obviously I knew about his Mob connections from the story of his life. Did you ever read the book The Joker is Wild by Art Cohn? Then you know the story about having his throat cut. It's a famous story - about his having been rescued by a Catholic priest who had some knowledge of dealing with throat injuries.

He still had a sense of humor about it. He sounded like a frog, but he could tell jokes like a winner. He became Joe E. Lewis. He changed his name. I worked for him and one of the last great pieces of material that he did before he died was a parody I wrote of My Way, which was Sinatra's big hit. 

I knew about Joe and the fact that he hung out with Frank. Frank was a good friend and very often bankrolled him when Joe was low economically. They ran with people like that. Sinatra, of course, was a Mob worshiper. He worshiped power and he liked to make the world shake. He liked to give commands. He wanted to be top dog. Just by being next to them he became a Mob worshiper and some people probably thought that he was a mobster. It was a romantic fantasy for him.

Kliph Nesteroff: When you were around Allan Drake did he ever talk about what happened to his wife? Did he ever mention it to you?

Sol Weinstein: Yes. He did mention it. Little Augie he knew... I don't know if he had ever suspected that his beautiful beauty-contest wife was having an affair with Little Augie or questioned what she was doing with him so late at night. They were lured and shot down by the Mob, but occasionally he had a feeling of awe when it came to speaking of him. 

Mobsters are very awesome to a lot of people. Here they are, they exist in a world of their own, they don't have to follow rules and they do what they want - and do terrible things. Some people get off on that. I wrote for Allan for quite a few years. I lost track of him. I did understand at one point he was selling cocaine toward the end of his career. 

By then I had cut my relationship with him. A lot of things that he did were scary, immoral things. I was glad that I did cut my ties. Jackie Kannon I met when I was looking for clients. I remember driving all the way out to Brooklyn to a place called Ben Maksik's Town and Country Club. That's another club that may have had some stink of Mob to it. 

Ben Maksik whoever he was... I don't know if he was a mobster or just dealing with mobsters, but a lot of club owners did have ties to mobsters. I don't know if it was to borrow money or to keep their club running or whatever. That's where I met Jackie Kannon. Jackie Kannon would work a place called The Rat Fink Room... was that owned by Mo Levy?

Kliph Nesteroff: Yes. His club The Roundtable was on the ground floor and then upstairs was The Rat Fink Room where Jackie Kannon held court.

Sol Weinstein: Well, I remember going there many, many times because I wrote very profusely for Jackie Kannon. By then I was strictly in the business. I wrote profusely for everybody I was ever connected with because that's just the way I was. I was a torrent of one-liners in those days.

Kliph Nesteroff: Jackie Kannon has a rep for being daring, almost in a Lenny Bruce kinda way. He talked about race and had a penchant for pushing the envelope.

Sol Weinstein: I wrote a lot of it. I wrote some of that for him. He was out to challenge the audience and make them oooh. Jackie Kannon was a minusha boychick, I think from Windsor, Canada. He worked around Detroit. He had married a great, big, blonde by the name of Lynn, who was working in an act with him. He was short, handsome, feisty. She was tall. 

She found out he was a good mealticket. He eventually made good money. He was also an entrepreneur. In that respect he screwed me. He put out a book called Poems for the John, much of which I wrote. He gave me bupkis for it. Beans. So I didn't work for him after that for a long time. I later came back to him when I had a partner, Howard Albrecht, who was my partner in show business for close to twenty years. 

We wrote a lot of shows for a lot of people, for Bob Hope and the Dean Martin Roasts and so on and so forth. Jackie Kannon was much more than just a stand-up comic and a pretty good singer. He was an entrepreneur and he knew how to make money. He tied up with a guy by the name of Alex Roman who was responsible for Poems for the John. 

It was smutty, it was caca-doody jokes, and the title should tell you everything. Jokes about sex, about spice, about farts, about everything. Jackie Kannon died very suddenly in the seventies. A sudden heart attack and it was all over for him. He made a lot of money and he didn't last too long.

Kliph Nesteroff: What was the club The Roundtable like? Belle Barth was house comic there for a while.

Sol Weinstein: Belle Barth became more famous by working down in Florida. Working for a Yiddish flavor crowd. Belle Barth was like your baba if your baba happened to be a potty mouth.

Kliph Nesteroff: Can you describe the Rat Fink Room for me a bit?

Sol Weinstein: Small, dimly lit, always had a good little trio. Had a good piano player by the name of Norm Geller. He sang a lot of songs and played straight. He sang a lot of song parodies that came out of my head. It was a popular joint for a while. I don't know why it stopped. The book business became so remunerative that he didn't need to work clubs all the time and then one day he died.

Kliph Nesteroff: You mentioned that you also spent time hanging out in Birdland - another Mo Levy joint.

Sol Weinstein: Well, I'm a be-bopper. Old be-boppers never die, they just shooby-doo away. I don't know what that means. I'm a pretty straight individual, but some of the people I worked for had some shadiness in their behavior, in their operations and in their past. But that's life. You can't choose your clients, you can only hope they don't screw you in the process.

Kliph Nesteroff: In September 1958, Jackie Kannon got in a vicious feud with Lou Holtz.

Sol Weinstein: I never knew that. I had no idea he was feuding with anybody.

Kliph Nesteroff: He also had a feud with Jerry Lewis. Jerry had done something called "the egg bit" on The Milton Berle Show.

Sol Weinstein: The egg bit. Well, comics do lift from one another. Jackie Kannon, at one time, was angry at a comic by the name of Corbett Monica. He accused him of lifting from him. Corbett was sort of a paisan version of Jackie, dark and diminutive, and not above lifting. Jackie didn't like him. He said, "You do that and I'll start taking your things," and I think that stopped it. But I don't know that for a fact. That's what Jackie told me.

Kliph Nesteroff: Did you, yourself, encounter much of Morris Levy?

Sol Weinstein: No.

Kliph Nesteroff: Jackie also put out a number of comedy LPs.

Sol Weinstein: I think there was one I had some hand in. I wrote the liner notes for one of them. "They come in to hate him," was the opening line - because he liked to bait the audience. He liked to upset them. At the end of the night he had worked so hard, he used every piece of shtick he had, he commanded, and by the end of the night the audience was so responsive to him. Lotta sweat. 

He also did an album in a prison. He was always looking for ways to shock. Odd things. Eye-catching things. That's the way he worked. A lot of people didn't like him. They didn't like his toughness. So he went in there with an "I'll show you" attitude. "I'll do everything. I'll bomb you with shtick until I make you like me." But as far as I'm concerned, I did write a lot for Joe E. Lewis, quite a bit for Allan Drake and a lot for Jackie Kannon.