[Dixielandjazz] "Sophie Tucker: The Last of the Red Hot Mamas" previewed, Part 2

[Robert Ringwald]

Tucker's Success Came at Cost to Her Private Life
by Judith Newmark
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 5, 2010
Sophie Tucker, who called herself the last of the red hot mamas, crafted her image
as carefully as any of today's tabloid stars.
And, like many of them, she used that image to disguise a troubled private life.
Born Sonia Kalish in the Ukraine about 1886 (she assigned herself different birth
dates over the years), she was a child when her parents, like many Jewish people
in Czarist Russia, came to America in search of a brighter future. They opened a
restaurant in Hartford, Conn., not far from a vaudeville house.
In her early teens, Tucker liked to slip in to watch the performers, then run around
to the stage door after the show and tell them where to eat. The meal included entertainment:
Sophie, singing.
Some performers were impressed by the girl. She wasn't conventionally pretty; at
14, she was also very heavy. But her big, belting voice knocked them out. They urged
her to go to New York to pursue a stage career.
Predictably, her parents disapproved. Instead of singing, she married a man named
Louis Tuck (whose surname she turned into Tucker) and had a son. But the marriage
didn't last. She was young, energetic and her family needed money. She gave the boy
to her sister and, early in the 20th century, set out to make her fortune.
With her looks and her voice, Tucker didn't conform to the dainty soprano style of
the day. To make money, she joined a minstrel troupe -- her vocal style worked great
with the "shouts" they performed. And she did it in blackface.
Tony Parise, co-author of "The Last of the Red Hot Mamas," a show about Sophie Tucker
at the New Jewish Theatre, said Tucker's big break came one night before a show,
when her trunk didn't arrive. She didn't have her costumes or her makeup. In blackface,
Parise said, Tucker "was like a drag queen. Imagine a drag queen going on without
costumes or makeup! But that's exactly what she did."
With that performance, Tucker was on the road to stardom. Unlike other women onstage,
Tucker frankly reveled in her differences and invited audiences to take her as they
found her.
She joked about her appetites -- for food, for men -- and kidded her audience about
the appetites that they had, too. By 1909, producer Flo Ziegfeld had put her in his
Follies, and William Morris had signed her.
"That's William Morris, the person," Parise says. "Not the agency. At first, it was
just a person."
In 1911, she recorded "Some of These Days," her signature song and, almost at once,
an American standard. (Bob Fosse used it, to great effect, for the climax of his
autobiographical movie musical "All That Jazz.")
Tucker's career on stage, in movie musicals and as a recording artist continued to
thrive for decades. Her personal life was another story. She married twice more,
both times briefly. She was good to her son, but they hardly knew each other; she
was more like a kind, distant relative than a mother.
"To take care of the people she loved, she had to leave the people she loved," Parise
said. "It was sad."
On the other hand, she had her passions. She actively supported women's right to
vote and entertainers' right to decent pay and conditions. She helped organize the
American Federation of Actors, an early entertainers' union, and became its president.
She donated generously to many charities.
And although her traditional relationships may have been thwarted, Tucker enjoyed
a long, deep friendship with Molly Elkins, a stunning black woman who had been an
entertainer in the famed Williams and Walker "all-colored show."
Parise believes that Tucker's friendship with Elkins -- her maid, confidant and dearest
friend -- was the central relationship of her adult life. At one point, when things
weren't going well for Tucker, Elkins and her husband, Bill, paid her doctor bills.
Elkins also introduced Tucker to Shelton Brooks, the black songwriter who composed
"Some of These Days."
Elkins "replaced my mother in my life," Tucker wrote in a 1950s article for Ebony
magazine. "Our friendship lasted... until the day Molly died (in 1929).... (Molly)
taught me how to live, how to take the bitter with the sweet."
That issue of Ebony is one of the "Tucker treasures" Parise has collected since he
began working on "The Last of the Red Hot Mamas." His collection is on display at
a JCC gallery near the theater during the run of the show.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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