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Escape to Vaudeville ic alums do their research By Peg g y Haine I Am Sophie Tucker: A Fictional Memoir By Susan and Lloyd Ecker Prospecta Press, 2014. 386 pp. I’m the last of the red-hot mamas, they’ve all cooled down but me / Flapper vamps? Say, what do they know? / Come get your hot stuff from this volcano!” – Sophie Tucker, “Last of the Red-hot Mamas”
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nd hot stuff she was. Sophie Tucker, born Sophie Kalish in the Ukraine in 1884, 1886, or 1887 (you know how those things are), grew up in her parents’ Hartford, Conn., restaurant, serving up chopped liver and belting out songs for extra tips. Learning early on that the customers were willing to shell out a few shekels for the little girl with the big voice, she was hooked on show biz, and had the chutzpah, work ethic, and the smarts to invent a persona that audiences loved for all of her 60-plus years of performing. In I Am Sophie Tucker: A Fictional Memoir, authors Susan and Lloyd Ecker have done a masterful research job, and
an equally fine one of fictionalizing the life of this raucous, rambunctious, selfassured, diligent, poker-playing, talented, generous, brash and brassy broad. Lending the project a helping hand, the Last of the Red-hot Mamas did a pretty good job of reinventing and fictionalizing herself. The Eckers, both Ithaca College alumni, had their first date at a 1973 campus Better Midler concert, and were fascinated by Midler’s “blue” Sophie Tucker jokes. They’ve spent many years researching Tucker’s life, speaking to everyone they could find who knew and remembered her, and going through her dozens and dozens of scrapbooks; the woman seems to have saved every scrap of paper she ever held— telegrams, contracts, mash notes, letters, reviews, programs.
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She was chubby, definitely not the chorus girl type, but, with her larger-thanlife personality and voice, and her dogged determination, she found her way into the Big Apple’s cafes, and, from there, into burlesque, where the only way she could break in was in blackface. She destroyed most evidence of that period, but the Eckers’ years of research managed to turn up one incriminating photo. Her burlesque cohort included the likes of Fanny Brice, Al Jolson, and Jimmy Durante. From there she graduated to vaudeville’s Keith Circuit, radio, recordings, and television, for a career spanning sixty years. Devoting herself to her work, she played as many as fourteen shows a week, traveling coast to coast by train before the days of commercial air travel, sending penny postcards to fans advising them of her imminent appearance in a theater near them. She delivered command performances for royalty and presidents, cabbies, crooks, and socialites, acquiring good friends among show business stars as well as the likes of Al Capone (he controlled the
Chicago club scene), J. Edgar Hoover (reputedly a cross-dresser, who, she claimed, asked for one of her dresses), and John F. Kennedy (who is reported to have behaved himself). In 1909 she joined the Ziegfield Follies. Her popularity didn’t sit well with the stars of the show, who had her fired. The next year she introduced the song “Some of These Days” which became her theme song. The Eckers kick off each chapter with an image of a relevant piece of sheet music featuring Ms. Tucker, and the book is peppered with show-biz photos, though some of them seem irrelevant. It’s also a compendium of commonly used Yiddishisms, with footnoted definitions that were spot on. Tucker knew what she wanted and she went for it. Her costumes dripped with furs, feathers, and jewels, she knew how to make an entrance, and she was the queen of double entendre. She knew what her audiences wanted and she gave it to them. In clubs and on Broadway, she could be very raunchy. But before three generations of royalty, she knew how to behave. She wanted to come across as a class act. Tucker herself published an autobiography in the mid-twentieth century, but the publisher’s censors expunged any of the racier material, leaving the bland, whitewashed story of a goody two-shoes, which Ms. Tucker certainly was not. Fictionalized (or perhaps not), the new biography does a good job of presenting the essence of the Tucker’s personality, drive, and talent. •
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