Old Banjo Eyes: Singer-Humanitarian Remembered Forty Years after His Death

By Michelle E. Malik

©2004

Almost unheard of today, Eddie Cantor was a phenomenal star of stage, screen, radio, and television from the early 1900’s to the 1960’s. Known for his large brown “banjo eyes,” his fit, youthful look, and his indomitable pep, this comedic singer, began his career as a pre-teen sensation in Gus Edward’s Kid Kabaret in the early nineteen-hundreds, and then went on to work the big time, the Broadway stage with the Ziegfeld Follies appearing in shows like The Midnight Rounders and Kid Boots with other stars like W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, and Fanny Brice the inspiration for the 1968 film, Funny Girl starring Barbra Streisand.

Cantor was swimming with success, when he lost almost all of his money in the great stock market crash of 1929. He made light of his situation by writing the hilarious booklets Caught Short and Yoo Hoo Prosperity, which did very well. A year later, he made his splash in Hollywood starring in the Samuel Goldwyn-Florenz Ziegfeld produced, Busby Berkeley choreographed, 1930 two-strip color musical, Whoopee!, taken straight from the Broadway stage. Goldwyn-produced films Roman Scandals, Palmy Days, Kid Millions, The Kid from Spain, and Strike Me Pink, costarring rising stars like George Murphy, Ann Sothern, and Ethel Merman with Betty Grable and Lucille Ball as Goldwyn Girls, followed.

Cantor accompanied his film success with an over thirty-year run in radio on the Chase and Sanborn Show in 1930-1932, the Pebeco Hour and the Pabst Blue Ribbon Show in the thirties, and the Texaco Show and The Eddie Cantor Show in the 1940s. Meanwhile, he jetted back and forth between coasts to star on Broadway shows like Banjo Eyes and film a movie or two for studios like Warner Bros. in Thank Your Lucky Stars featuring a cavalcade of big names, Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, John Garfield, Bette Davis and more and If You Knew Susie and Show Business with Joan Davis, Constance Moore, and George Murphy.

In 1950, Cantor was the first non-classical performer to fill Carnegie Hall with his one-man show, appearing alone on the stage for two hours of anecdotes and songs and backed by two pianos, as he reminiscing about his years in show business. Throughout the 1950’s he hosted several seasons of TV’s Colgate Comedy Hour. As a contemporary and friend of comic giants Jack Benny, the Marx Bros., George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Milton Berle, Eddie had just as much clout, if not more than his pals in the ratings and audience adoration in radio, stage, and films.

In 1953, a mediocre biopic was made about Eddie Cantor’s life, The Eddie Cantor Story starring actor Keefe Braselle, who although had heart, was too tall, gangly and overly-animated to capture the more contemplative side of Cantor. The studio neglected to reflect Cantor’s lifetime humanitarian efforts and the film work he did with other studios, leaving the biopic rather slim. The soundtrack however, including some of Eddie’s signature songs like “Makin’ Whoopee!” “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider,” “Ma! He’s Making Eyes at Me,” and the ever-popular Looney Tunes theme song, “Merrily We Roll Along,” which Cantor co-wrote, was the highlight of the film.

Cantor had a hand in launching the careers of Dinah Shore, Deanna Durbin, and took a stand against NBC when they threatened to take him off the air when Sammy Davis Jr. appeared as his guest for two consecutive weeks. Cantor wrote several books of memoirs on his experiences in show business including The Way I See It, Take My Life, and My Life is In Your Hands. While raising his five daughters Margie, Natalie, Edna, Marilyn and Janet, with his loving wife Ida of nearly fifty years, he managed to make time to tour universities to talk about his fifty year career in show business, support the war effort, and coined the phrase and helped develop The March of Dimes with Franklin D. Roosevelt to find a cure for infantile paralysis. As Eddie would say, “Nice work for a grandfather, ain’t it?”

In the last ten or so years of his life, Eddie suffered from a few debilitating heart attacks and survived the deaths of his oldest daughter Margie in 1959 of cancer and his wife Ida in 1962. He continued to do a little radio into the sixties and died at his home in Beverly Hills on October 10, 1964. He was seventy-two years old. Curiously, just a day before he died, he signed a contract to have a celebration of his life and career put onto an album, which was later called The Legend of Eddie Cantor, narrated by film producer and very close friend Georgie Jessel.

Today, Eddie Cantor is remembered with three stars for his contributions to film, records and radio on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and his footprints in Grauman’s Chinese Theater with the clever monogram “Here’s Looking at You, Sid.” UCLA has an extensive Eddie Cantor archive in Special Collections, featuring his numerous honorary plaques bestowed on him by government officials for his humanitarian efforts, as well as film props, original radio scripts, and rare pictures, among other items.

The Eddie Cantor Appreciation Society was formed in 1993 by first president, Sheila Riddle, to commemorate the many talents and contributions of the great musical comedian and humanitarian. I have continued as president since 1998. I try to have a convention or banquet every year with Cantor family members, Eddie Cantor’s youngest daughter Janet Gari, his grandson Brian Gari, granddaughter Amanda Abel, Eddie’s sons-in-law, Hogan’s Heroes actor, singer and author Robert Clary, and painter/actor Roberto Gari (Strangers with Candy). Sadly, we lost Eddie Cantor’s honorary sixth daughter, Sheila Rogers Engelberg, the very first Eddie Cantor fan club president in June 2003, who was very supportive of our efforts and became my dear friend.

Past conventions in Los Angeles have been held at The Beverly Garland Holiday Inn, The Magic Castle, a tour of the UCLA Special Collection Archive, and Will Rogers State Park. This year, to commemorate Eddie Cantor, forty years after his death, we will have a luncheon banquet at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City on October 9^th. Invited guests include Joan Leslie (Yankee Doodle Dandy), singer Tony Martin, Margaret Kerry (the rotoscope model for Disney’s Tinker Bell), Fayard Nicholas of the fabulous Nicholas Bros. and Tommy Bond (Our Gang), all costars of Eddie’s in his various films. Members of the Cantor family will also attend, and there will be entertainment by local performers Richard Halpern, Mr. Tin Pan Alley, and Rick Rogers, the Baron of Boop., a movie screening that evening at Old Town Music Hall of The Kid from Spain (1932), and a Kaddish Prayer Service at Hillside Memorial Park, his final resting place on Sunday, October 10th.

With all his fame, Eddie Cantor was always grounded, never letting show business go to his head. For those of us who still hold Eddie in high regard then, it is Cantor’s humility that strikes us above all. For “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.” –Eddie Cantor