Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman

Introduction: Humpty Dumpty

1 By September 1936, Allan Segal was an eighth grader who had been around. Just shy of turning twelve, he was already on his second last name, third father, andfourthschool,andhestillhadonemorenameandfourhighschoolsahead of him. But for now the years spent rambling between Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York were over and he was settled in Los Angeles, a city he first saw in1930,whenthetwentiesboomhadburstbuthaddoneitswork.LosAngeles had become a great city, a great port, a major industrial center and the capital of show business, which was his business. He’d put on some weight, but that could be funny, and he was a funnyman. Within a year of his return to Los Angeles he had made his mark. In November 1937, his name appeared in his junior high school’s gossipy “Guess Who” newspaper column, which noted that Segal was “roly-poly” and also “very witty.” In February 1938, he contributed a letter to the Los Angeles Herald ’s “Listen, World,” column that won him a cash prize, and in June he spoke on “The Passing Parade of Invention” at his ninth-grade graduation. Segal’s funny and sometimes coyly risqué school newspaper articles, exuberant wit, Humpt y Dumpt y 2 / Overweight Sensation and performance as a comic character named Roundy Robins in a school theatrical called Laundry Mark made him a celebrity among his fellow students. They were an elite group from tony Hancock Park, where stringent zoning ensured the houses were large enough and the lawns deep enough to attract Howard Hughes and Mae West. Segal blossomed there, and in the spring of 1938 he cracked the code of his comic gift and discovered his life’s work while knocking out some copy at 300 McCadden Place, probably in room 100-M, whereMrs.MunscherheldhomeroomatJohnBurroughsJuniorHighSchool. That is where Allan Segal first got in touch with his future as Allan Sherman. Humpty Dumpty sat on a train Happily singing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen”; All the conductors and all the porters, Couldn’t get Humpty out of his quarters! In four lines the parody nails the themes of Sherman’s childhood world as well as his future life and career. At thirteen he knew who he was and what he liked. Not all the news was good. Humpty Dumpty was and would remain the perfect metaphor for the rotund, damaged Sherman. The ill-fated egg man suggests the fatal cracks in Sherman’s personality that in this little ditty, and in his later life, he papered over with charm, brains, and wit. (Eventually he ran out of material.) Crucially, the parody links Jewishness and singing to happiness. It combines a Jewish work—the originally Yiddish song “Bei Mir Bistu Shein” that in 1937 was an English-language hit for the Andrews Sisters—with the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, making it just a step and twenty-fiveyearsremovedfrom“SarahJackman,”Sherman’sfame-making1962 parody of “Frère Jacques.” Just as important as Humpty Dumpty is the fact that he is on the move. The Union Pacific rail link between Los Angeles and Chicago was one of the most important elements of Sherman’s unsettled childhood. The rhyme doesn’t say where Humpty is traveling, but Allan often headed to Chicago to live with his Yiddish-speaking maternal grandparents, Esther and Leon Sherman, whom he came to love deeply. Other relatives felt differently. “My grandmother would not look at Leon and Esther Sherman,” said Evelyn Raden , one of Allan’s cousins. “She said Leon was a shikker and Esther a whore. Introduction / 3 She would not be on the same side of the room as them.” Whatever drinking and fooling around took place paled next to what young Allan learned about another Chicago relative. His paternal uncle, Abraham Coplon, was a dentist , nudist, raw foodist, and author of Man Alive! An Analysis of the Human Struggle, which condemned as evil medicine, bread, cooking, and clothing. “He screwed every woman in Chicago who was standing,” said Lee Cooper, a relation. “If they were standing he made them lie down.” Allan was friendly with his cousin Morris, Coplon’s son, who as a boy in the 1930s decided that Allan’s mother, Rose, was crazy. “It didn’t take me long to see that she was a congenitalliar.Rosecouldn’ttellthetruthifherlifedependedonit.Clinically she could be labeled schizophrenic. She lived in a fantasy world, literally.” Allan faced a family life at the same level of headlong eccentricity when...