My Australian digital news journalist (@JustJenKing), reached via Twitter, has sent me yet a third link to an obituary on Blaze Starr. How connected we are.
This one comes from The Daily Beast, an online news outlet that has quite a following. I've heard of them, but they just aren't on my radar to go to on any regular basis. It's a generation thing.
Like many things, something always reminds me of something else. And reading Blaze's obituary I started to think about Myron Cohen, an advanced age standup comedian that appeared regularly on the Ed Sullivan show, and I suspect in other places where Jewish comedians were found.
Mr. Cohen was hardly an attractive looking man, nearly bald, with big ears, but he did have an expressive face and drop-dead timing. He had the typical Yiddish/Jewish speech patter that eliminated all commas in anything he said. Commas became periods. He smoked while he performed.
Mr. Cohen told jokes that were stories. Apparently, the story about him was that he told so many stories to his colleagues who worked in the garment industry during lunch hours on Seventh Avenue, that someone convinced him he should go on the stage.
In the 50s and 60s if you were to go through the garment district at lunch hour there would be so many men smoking, standing on the sidewalk in overcoats, that you might have thought they were the standing homeless. They weren't. They just didn't go very far on their lunch hours, and instead just stood around and talked and smoked. They looked like a pile of woolen overcoats sending smoke signals somewhere.
Myron, lured from his job, followed someone's advice. He became a comedian, which is not easy to do in New York, since I remember the usual rhetorical question asked of nearly everyone, "What are you, some sort of comedian?"
So, here's Mr. Cohen on the Sullivan show, with enough time to quickly establish himself in front of a live audience, being broadcast throughout the nation, warming up to one of his stories.
The one I particularly remember, delivered in that distinctive patter, was the one about the fellow who was a bit naughty, who also had a married girlfriend. Well one day--maybe during lunch hour-- he meets his girlfriend in her apartment and they start to roll around on her bed.
Suddenly, there's a sound at the door, and the startled girlfriend correctly assumes that her husband has come home early for some reason. This is no time to be caught in her bedroom with another man in front of a raging, jealous husband, so she quickly shoves the boyfriend into a closet.
She smooths the bed covers out and re-buttons her blouse and nervously expresses surprise that hubby has come home early for some reason. Since he's already the jealous type, and perhaps he's caught her before in compromising positions, he starts to rage that he knows there's someone hiding in the apartment.
She of course tells him no, but that doesn't stop him from raging trough the place opening anything that might conceal someone. Sure enough, he comes to the closet where she had thought she could successfully hid the boyfriend. The husband yanks the door open and reveals the half naked boyfriend nervously cowering in the closet, surrounded by clothes, with his hand strategically placed covering his lower half.
Glares all around. No one says anything, until the boyfriend comes up with what he believes is the best and most logical explanation for his presence in the closet of an attractive, married woman, being confronted by a raging husband: "Well, everyone has to be someplace."
Now of course all this sounds a bit too contrived, and that's what jokes usually are. Setups for the punch line. A rabbi, a priest and a minister have probably never simultaneously walked into a bar, or any other place.
But something always reminds me of something. And there, in the third obituary on Blaze Starr, is a further reference to her liaison with JFK. Kiss-and-tell-and-then-some Blaze is quoted as telling an interviewer something about the man who would become president.
“'He was great—fast, but great,' she told a television interviewer in the late 1980s. 'He was going to be President. I guess he had to be in a hurry.' On one occasion, she claimed, Long found the pair together in a closet—she told him they had been looking for her mink coat."
Even future presidents have to start out somewhere.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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