Cantor, Eddie (1882-1964)

Dubbed "Banjo Eyes" for his expressive saucer-like orbs, and "The Apostle of Pep" for his frantically energized physical style, comic song-and-dance man Eddie Cantor came from the vaudeville tradition of the 1920s, and is remembered as a prime exponent of the now discredited blackface minstrel tradition, his brief but historic movie association with the uniquely gifted choreographic innovator Busby Berkeley, and for turning the Walter MacDonald-Gus Kahn song "Making Whoopee" into a massive hit and an enduring standard. In a career that spanned almost 40 years, Cantor achieved stardom on stage, screen, and, above all, radio, while on television he was one of the rotating stars who helped launch the Colgate Comedy Hour.

Cantor's is a prototypical show business rags-to-riches story. As Isadore Itzkowitz, born into poverty in a Manhattan ghetto district and orphaned young, he was already supporting himself in his early teens as a Coney Island singing waiter with a piano player named Jimmy Durante before breaking into burlesque and vaudeville (where he sang songs by his friend Irving Berlin), and made it to Broadway in 1916. The small, dapper Jewish lad became a Ziegfeld star, appearing in the Follies of 1917 (with Will Rogers, W.C. Fields, and Fanny Brice), 1918, and 1919. In the first, he sang a number in blackface, and also applied the burnt cork to team in a skit with black comedian Bert Williams, with whom he would work several times over the years. Irving Berlin wrote the 1919 songs and Cantor introduced "You'd be Surprised." A bouncy, hyperactive performer, he rarely kept still and would skip and jump round the stage, clapping his white-gloved hands while performing a song. He also rolled his prominent eyes a lot and a Ziegfeld publicity hack came up with the Banjo Eyes sobriquet.

After a falling out with Flo Ziegfeld, Cantor starred in other people's revues for a few years. Reconciled with Ziegfeld, he starred in the musicals Kid Boots and Whoopee! The first became the silent screen vehicle for his Hollywood debut in 1926; the second, based on a play The Nervous Wreck, cast Cantor as a hypochondriac stranded on a ranch out West, introduced the song "Making Whoopee," and brought him movie stardom when Samuel Goldwyn filmed it in 1930. Whoopee! was not only one of the most successful early musicals to employ two-tone Technicolor, but marked the film debut of Busby Berkeley, who launched his kaleidoscopic patterns composed of beautiful girls (Betty Grable was one) to create a new art form. The winning formula of Berkeley's flamboyance and Cantor's insane comedic theatrics combined in three more immensely profitable boxoffice hits: Palmy Days (1931), which Cantor co-wrote; The Kid from Spain (1932), in which Berkeley's chorus included Grable and Paulette Goddard; and, most famously, the lavish, and for its day outrageous, Roman Scandals (1933), in which the young Lucille Ball made a fleeting appearance. A dream fantasy, in which Cantor is transported back to ancient Rome, the star nonetheless managed to incorporate his blackface routine, while the "decadent" production numbers utilized black chorines in a manner considered demeaning by modern critics.

Meanwhile, the ever-shrewd Cantor was establishing himself on radio ahead of most of his comedian colleagues. In 1931 he began doing a show for Chase and Sanborn Coffee. By its second year, according to radio historian John Dunning, it was the highest rated show in the country. The star gathered a couple of eccentric comedians around him, beginning with Harry "Parkyakarkus" Einstein, who impersonated a Greek, and Bert Gordon, who used a thick accent to portray The Mad Russian, while, over the years, the show also featured young singers such as Deanna Durbin, Bobby Breen, and Dinah Shore. Cantor remained on the air in various formats until the early 1950s, backed by such sponsors as Texaco, Camel cigarettes, toothpaste and laxative manufacturers Bristol Myers, and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. His theme song, with which he closed each broadcast, was a specially arranged version of "One Hour with You."

After his flurry of screen hits during the 1930s, Cantor's movie career waned somewhat, but he enjoyed success again with Show Business (1944) and If You Knew Susie (1948), both of which he produced. A cameo appearance in The Story of Will Rogers (1952) marked the end of his 26-year, 16-film career, but in 1950 he had begun working on television, alternating with comedians such as Bob Hope, Martin and Lewis, and his old buddy Durante, as the star of Colgate's Comedy Hour. In the autumn of 1952 Cantor had a serious heart attack right after a broadcast and left the air for several months. He returned in 1953, but began gradually withdrawing from the entertainment world.

Eddie Cantor wrote four autobiographical books, and in 1953, Keefe Brasselle played the comedian in a monumentally unsuccessful biopic, The Eddie Cantor Story. In 1956 the Academy honored him with a special Oscar for "distinguished service to the film industry." In 1962, the year he published the last of four autobiographical books, he was predeceased by his wife, Ida, immortalized in the song, "Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider," to whom he was married for 48 years. Eddie Cantor died two years later. His screen persona was not, and is not, to everyone's taste, and in life, some found him egocentric and difficult. He remains, however, inimitable.

—Ron Goulart

Further Reading:

Barrios, Richard. A Song in the Dark. New York, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Bordman, Gerald. American Musical Theatre. New York, Oxford University Press, 1978.

Dunning, John. On The Air. New York, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Goldman, Herbert G. Banjo Eyes: Eddie Cantor and the Birth of Modern Stardom. New York, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Fisher, James. Eddie Cantor: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1997.

Koseluk, Gregory. Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business. Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland, 1995.