[Dixielandjazz] Sophie Tucker book

[Robert Ringwald]

Hartford’s Vaudeville Star Sophie Tucker Subject of New Book
by Susan Dunne
Hartford Courant, November 20, 2014
Sophie Tucker, the legendary bad-girl jazz singer who was raised in Hartford, wrote
a memoir in 1935, when she was in her late 40s. For the next 10 years, she went back
and forth between publishers and ghost-writers. It was finally published in 1945.
All the risque stuff was cut out and it was awful.
“Eighty-five percent of it was just made up and maybe 15 percent was the actual truth,”
said Lloyd Ecker.
Ecker and his wife Susan decided to do something about that. The Rockland County,
N.Y., couple spent years poring over Tucker’s scrapbooks and researching her life,
and now have published “I Am Sophie Tucker.”
It’s not a biography. It’s the flip side of that autobiography. “It’s 85 percent
fact and 15 percent we’re not so sure,” Ecker said of their “fictional memoir.”
And if readers are confused, when the book is done, about what is true and what is
not, that doesn’t bother the Ecker. Susan Ecker said it would be impossible to write
a fully nonfiction version of the life of Tucker, who was called “The Last of the
Red-Hot Mamas” because of her risque songs.
“She fictionalized her life all the time. Whenever it was convenient she changed
the story. Every decade she told a different story, depending on what her needs were.
That’s the kind of person she was,” Susan Ecker said. “After reading her scrapbooks
for eight years, we developed her voice.”
As in, her making-up-her-life-story voice.
“I Am Sophie Tucker” (Prospecta Press, 400 pp.) tells the story of Tucker’s life
from her birth in 1887 to 1913, by which time she had become a vaudeville star. The
book goes into great detail about her Hartford upbringing, her friendships, her family
and her yearning to be a performer.
The book is the first in what is expected to be a three-book series. The Eckers say
they are planning to adapt it for stage. “What she wanted [with her memoir] is that
they would turn it into a movie, which they never did,” Lloyd Ecker said.
Tucker was born Sonya Kalish while her parents were en route from Ukraine to America.
Her parents changed their surname to Abuza. Sonya grew up helping out in their restaurant
on Front Street, sometimes singing for customers.
Her stage name Tucker was a variation on the name of her first husband, Louis Tuck.
She became a star of vaudeville, Broadway, recordings, film, radio and television.
She died in 1966 and is buried in Emmanuel Cemetery in Wethersfield.
The bulk of the Eckers’ research came from the 400 scrapbooks kept by Tucker from
1906 to 1966. They also talked to people who knew Tucker, scanned Tucker archives
and found the manuscript for that bad 1945 memoir. “There were a lot of things crossed
out. It must have been juicy,” Susan Ecker said.
The book is filled with photos and memorabilia from Tucker’s entire life, not just
the years covered in the Eckers’ story.
The Eckers said they didn’t leave out anything factual that happened during those
years, but they did embellish when the research leads trailed off and questions remained
about exactly what happened.
The Eckers’ most spectacular fabrication comes when Sophie returns to Hartford, and
takes time to get together with a gangster -- a regular at her father’s old card
games -- to arrange a murder. The victim was a real person, but the end of his life
was sketchy, Susan Ecker said.
“We hired someone to find the death certificate.... It doesn’t exist. He just kind
of disappeared,” said Susan Ecker. “That’s the basis of where we went with that story.”
The Eckers also have made a documentary, “The Outrageous Sophie Tucker,” which will
be shown at the Mandell JCC Hartford Jewish Film Festival on March 12. That film,
Lloyd Ecker said, is 100 percent fact. The Eckers will come to Hartford for the screening
of that film at Infinity Music Hall on Front Street. The screening will be accompanied
by a performance by a Sophie Tucker impersonator.
-30

-Bob Ringwald
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