Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman

4 | There is Nothing Like a Lox

83 OntheeveningsofSeptember21andSeptember28,1957,twoconsecutiveSaturdaysthatconvenientlyfelljustbeforeandaftertheJewish NewYearholiday, Vernon Hills Country Club in Eastchester, New York, presented an amateur variety show starring Allan Sherman and other members called “Handicaps of 1957.”Theeventwasheldintheclub’stheater,whichthe“Handicaps”program called,“TheVernonHillsLittleTheater(VeryLittle).”Theself-deprecatinghumor was a good sign. Vernon Hills had claims to self-importance, but declined to exercise them. Respected golf course architects Alfred H. Tull and Devereux Emmet designed its eighteen holes in 1926, and after World War II, Jews flocked to the club to live the good life in the New York suburbs. Brooklyn-born Milton Farber,presidentoftheFarberwarepotsandpanscompany,wasclubpresident in 1947, and in 1953 Vernon Hills held a nine-hole benefit that guaranteed member attendance with guest celebrity golfers Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, PerryComo,andSidCaesar.Theirhighjinksandwisecrackswereintunewith the club’s genial mood, which could be disturbed by a major infraction: There There Is Nothing Like a Lox 84 / Overweight Sensation was a “Cadillac Row” in the parking lot, said former member John Sturner. “If you had a Buick, you didn’t park there.” The number Sherman prepared for the “Handicaps” show broke another club rule. “When you are Golfing at the Club, even though everybody around youisJewish,youactgentile,andnobodyinthefoursomebringsuphisUncle, the Junk Dealer.” Those words were not written over the clubhouse door, but Sherman got the unspoken message and translated it into those words in his autobiography. The “Handicaps” program did not let on what Sherman had in mind. His performance, “Bewitched,” was described as, “Music by Richard Rodgers—Words by Allan Sherman.” This was true, but “Trampled by Allan Sherman” would have been truer. I’m wild again Beguiled again A whimpering tsimpering tsild again Tzimished, fachottered, and tzebulbet am I. Can’t sleep a wink I lay and think She’s wearing my mink while she’s out with Fink Tzimished, fatroshket and tziboorjet am I. Tzimished(confused),fachottered(screwed-up),andtzebulbetisnotabad translationofbewitched,bothered,andbewildered,exceptthattzebulbetdoes not seem to be a word in Yiddish or any other language, and it completely undermines, obliterates, laughs at and deflates the original. The parody is a comic assault. It is the kind of treatment that made Rodgers later call Sherman “a destroyer.” Rodgers wrote “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” with lyricist and friend Lorenz Hart for the 1940 musical Pal Joey. In the early twentieth century, Rodgers and Hart were both campers at the same Catskills resort for German Jews, and surely the last thing Rodgers expected to happen to “Bewitched” was that someone would turn the subtly racy confession of love into a song about a marital spat between two Jews from the old country. Pal Joey’s Vera Simpson, a San Francisco socialite, is amused at the fact that she, a sexually experienced woman, is so besotted with Joey that she “couldn’t There Is Nothing Like a Lox / 85 sleep.”ButJewsthatsprinkletheirspeechwithYiddisharenotknownfortheir sophisticated habit of inspecting their troubles for their own bemusement. When they cannot get a good night’s sleep it is because they are good and worried, like the jilted husband in Sherman’s parody. Goldeneh Moments from Broadway Throughout the 1950s, Sherman wrote, rewrote and informally performed for friends and family more than twenty Jewish parodies of songs from the great Broadway musicals. This was a departure. In his musicals Nothing Ventured, Mirth of a Nation, and The Golden Touch, as well as his special material for various performers he honed his skills as a lyricist. Parodies, such as his college hits, “Don’t Burn Down Bidwell’s,” “We Are Civilians ’43,” and “Yokohama” were also of longstanding interest. But with the exception of his early Humpty Dumpty rhyme, he rarely combined his love of song parody with his eagerness to express himself Jewishly. In the 1950s, Sherman seized this neglected opportunity. The country was changing. Sherman’s generation of Jews were now adults, and the “fine balancing act” of being a Jew and an American was tipping away from the early twentieth-century ideal of the Melting Pot toward a new hybrid formula that allowed for Jewishness. Sherman was on the right track with his Jewish “Golden Touch,” except he was a little early. Within a few years, Jewish writers and comedians, including some that wrote song parodies, produced works that were frank about their Jewish material and depended less on code words such as “chopped liver.” In the 1950s, Jewishness turned out to be just what everyone wanted. Marilyn Monroe got some in 1956 when she married playwright...