Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman

3 | I've Got a Secret

58 After getting everything he wants Sam Noodleman is miserable, and that is the moral of The Golden Touch. Better known as Cheesecake Sam and owner of a New York delicatessen of the same name, Noodleman curses the day he wastemptedbyrichesandglamourtogoupscaleand French.Hemadealotof money, yes, but is he happy serving paté? The question answers itself because, after all, what is paté? “Chopped liver! But without the chicken fat!!” When Sherman told his college dean he wanted to write another musical, maybe two, the first was Mirth of a Nation. The second was The Golden Touch, a comic fable about the evils of Jewish assimilation that is a retelling of the Greek myth of King Midas. The musical’s fumbling hero is Joe Midasovich, a Cheesecake Sam’s busboy too poor to marry the girl he loves and so is easily conned into signing away his soul to the devilish Benny. He is the one who shortens Joe’s last name to Midas and seduces him with visions of joining the “horsey set.” In his new life, Benny tells Joe, “You’re out on an open field, surrounded by your guests in formal riding regalia. Suddenly you hear the call of the hunting horn and off you gallop on your trusty steed, with the baying I’ve Got a Secret I’ve Got a Secret / 59 hounds at your side.” Joe falls for it and his new power transforms everything it touches. This leads to Midas-type success and unhappiness. Cheesecake Sam’s becomes Chez Kaique Sam, where instead of serving sandwiches named after the great Jewish comedians—the Milton Berle on rye, the Joe E. Lewis triple-decker—dishes are named for unhappy heiresses, such as “Sauté of Mutton a la Barbara Hutton” and “Filet of Fluke a la Doris Duke.” Sam regrets thatheturnedhisbackonhisbackground.Lifewasgood.“Thenwehadtoget fancy. High class!” Others that Joe made rich have the same problem. They no longer recognize themselves, they do not know who they have become, and together they sing, “Down with success.” Success! Success! He wanted to be a success but it made him a mess! A mess! A woe is meable, Simon Lagreeable [sic] mess! Joe comes to the same conclusion. He gained the money he needs to marry, but in the process lost his girl. She misses the old Joe. At the close of the play, he goes back to being Joe Midasovich and working at Cheesecake Sam’s, but now as a waiter, a job that earns him just enough to marry. ShermancowroteTheGoldenTouchin1947inNewYorkwithBudBurtson, acomedysongwriterwhocommandedasmuchas$1,500forthethree-minute songs he sold to clients such as jokester Jerry Lester. Sherman could not write music and would always need a composer partner for original tunes, but he was fluent in the argumentative, rapid, and emphatic speech that makes the distinctive New York delivery a Jewish language. His Golden Touch characters shout and argue like natives. The style probably “represents the influence of conversational norms of East European immigrants,” and Sherman picked that up from his immigrant grandparents. He made it part of his persona, and the Illinois Hillel Post correctly associated it with “Noo Yawk.” It was the only place in America where the Jewish population was great enough to nurture such speech into a regional dialect. From 1920 until 1960, the city’s two million Jews accounted for 40 percent of the group’s national population and formed New York’s largest “ethnic-religious” group. ShermanwaspartofthatdominantNewYorkgroupfrom1945to1960,and during those years he got his graduate education in Jewish life. That life was 60 / Overweight Sensation not always very Jewish. Such paradoxes are what made New York “the Jewish Camelot.”Wonderfulandcontradictorythingswerepossible.Asacommunity, the Jews built institutions that made New York the national Jewish cultural center, but as individuals they reveled in the city as a “cosmopolitan paradise” and took “Jewishness quite for granted.” Sherman also lived it up, but when it came to Jewishness he had the fervor of the convert. It was not an inheritance he received at birth but a decision, a strategy for survival, and his self-made identity required expression. Many New York Jews disagreed. Between 1945 and 1955, a period of Jewish American life sometimes called the Golden Decade, Jews “deepened and intensified their identity as Americans.” They joined synagogues, but Jewishness went underground.Itbecameasecret.Shermansearchedforawaytotellthatsecret. It was a disposition he brought with him when he arrived in New York. Golden Touch stemmed from Sherman’s days at...