Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman

9 | Allan in Wonderland

188 OnFebruary9,1964,theNewYorkJournal-AmericanranaprofileofSherman while he toured England. International concerts were the logical next step. Over the past year he had blanketed the American market with an extensive tour and television appearances, and he had fans in London, Leeds, and Manchester. My Son, the Folk Singer sold 200,000 records in England and “Hello Muddah” was also a hit. So on January 31, Sherman flew to London for a two-week stint of live concerts, BBC television appearances, and bouts of sumptuous indulgence. He and his small entourage from home, just road manager Marvin Tabolsky and a substitute musical conductor, Joe Guercio, travelled from concert to concert in a Jaguar. In London, Sherman’s room with a fireplace was in the posh Dorchester Hotel, “a fortress propped up with moneybags” built in 1931 as a “gilded refuge of the rich.” At dinner, Sherman atewithoutrestraint,hisusualapproach,attheexclusiveWhiteElephantClub, a show business redoubt where actors and producers talked, ate, drank and waited for reviews in the morning papers. “We would go out to these fancy restaurants and have these great meals,” Tabolsky said. “Allan never held back. Allan in Wonderland Allan in Wonderland / 189 He ate everything, escargot, whatever was served he wanted to experience. Smoked salmon and capers for breakfast with the diced onions. It was a whole new experience.” Part of this abandon included visits to prostitutes, Guercio said. The concerts were a success, too. “He was funny every night,” rememberedGuercio .“Hewastheinthing.Beautiful.”Butdespitetheaccolades,and underneath the hedonism, Sherman was worried. From the beginning of his fame he was haunted by the idea that it could suddenly vanish like an easily won gambling haul, and he told the newspaper that he was girding himself against this possibility. “I’m pledged not to get desperate.” It would not be an easy pledge to fulfill. While Sherman was in England, the Beatles landed in America, and the day the Sherman story ran was the same day the group debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show. Beatlemania was the first of several cultural shifts that in 1964 began to loosen Sherman’s grip on fame and success. Bigger stars than Sherman were worried about the Beatles. Between songs on their Sullivan debut, Elvis Presley wired them a welcome that Sullivan announced on the air. That was one way for Presley to keep his name before the multitudes of teenaged girls that once had screamed for him. Presley knew enough to be scared, but many in the mainstream media, such as talk show pioneer Jack Paar, had no idea what was going on and scorned the shaggy-haired group. Meanwhile, the Beatles’ television audience was forty-one million, 20 percent of the country, and the adoration that followed them astonished disinterested observers. Sherman got a chance to witness it firsthand. On August 21, 1964, he was in Seattle, Washington, to play benefits for the local Variety Club and Children’s Orthopedic Hospital. Traveling as usual with his road manager Tabolsky, Sherman stayed at the Edgewater Inn. The hotel’s other guests were the Beatles, in town to perform at the Seattle Coliseum. “I got up one day and I saw all these workers putting up barriers, and police on horseback,” Tabolsky said. He and Sherman wondered, “Is the president in town, some dignitary? No, it was the Beatles. It was pandemonium.” A writer for the Saturday Evening Post understood it. The Beatles were selling pure happiness. Those recent pop culture kings of the sneer and the curled lip, Marlon Brando, Presley, and James Dean were out. “Exuberance is in. . . . Self-pity is out, whooping with joy is in.” In late 1962, Sherman had 190 / Overweight Sensation hit it big with the same product. His parodies were a celebratory overturning of stale and self-important icons. But now he allowed himself some spite and meanness toward the young. That struck a chord among adults in a culture beginning to feel the strain of the still-nascent generation gap, but it worked against the comic instincts and reputation that made him a success. Sherman’s fourth album, Allan in Wonderland, went on sale in March 1964 and on April 10 Time magazine, which the year before enjoyed “There Is Nothing Like a Lox,” now publicized the new album’s “The Drop-Outs March,” a number it professed to believe “may do more to keep kids in school than hours of sermonizing by principals and parents...