In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (40 page)

The problem is that the Catskills are gone, now that we might like to return and to taste it, to show our children, to spend a weekend or a week in a family resort. Say what you will, the hotel was full of life, with amateur comedians, singers, and social critics. That life could be chaotic and challenging, like the day that nearly half the staff quit at the same time, but by and large it was festive. The Delmar was warm and homey and American Jews could be themselves there, in the fresh air and rolling hills of the Catskill Mountains. We let that world die of neglect, and we haven’t built anything like it that can take its place.

Part 4

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NTERTAINMENT

Flagler News, Flagler Hotel, South Fallsburg, 1929. In the 1920s and 1930s, hotels large enough to provide entertainment did so with in-house entertainment staffs, often numbering twenty people. The Flagler was one of the largest hotels in this era, and for a number of those years, Moss Hart was the director of entertainment, with Dory Schary as his assistant.  C
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Casino, Plaza Hotel, South Fallsburg. This is a typical casino, with folding wooden chairs on a wood floor. Even in a hotel that could hold 200 guests, this was a common form. Hotels in this size range often went broke building fancier nightclubs.
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Program from Grossinger’s, 1939. Henry Tobias ran the entertainment here, and well-known jazz musicians Willie “The Lion” Smith and Hot Lips Paige played.
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Champagne Hour at the Waldemere Hotel, Livingston Manor, 1954. Cuban band leader Emilio Reyes and dance team Pedro Aguilar and Millie Donay running the weekly dance contest. Latin music was extremely popular in Catskills hotels in this period.
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OLDWASSER

Rock and roll show tickets, Eldorado Hotel. In the 1960s, some hotels like the Eldorado made extra money running midweek rock shows with top groups.
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Nightclub admission tickets, Kiamesha Fairmount and Stevensville Lake Hotel. Many hotels gave out these tickets to guests at dinner, to prevent bungalow colony residents and guests from other hotels from sneaking into the show.
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I
NTRODUCTION

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n the early years, Catskills entertainment was all homegrown, ranging from literature readings and discussions to amateur nights. As larger and all-inclusive hotels promising everything, Catskills resorts had to continually entertain their guests. The Mountains quickly became famous for entertainment, especially the comedians who began their careers there. But the classic entertainment figure is the tummler, a regular fixture at the hotel who performed, emceed, and directed a wide range of activities. His humor was often developed out of the daily life of the people he associated with, so that much of the Catskills comedy was an organic product of its own fermentation. That locally based entertainment remained, even in medium-sized and some larger hotels, as a part of the overall package. And in bungalow colonies it was very central, since only the larger colonies provided any regular shows, and then only on one or two weekend nights.

Joey Adams’s “Comics, Singers, and Tummlers” comes from
The Borscht Belt
(written with Henry Tobias), his autobiographical account of life in the Catskills entertainment world. He details the many things the social director/tummler had to do to keep the guests happy, and brings us right into showtime. Adams also recounts stories of many of the world-famous comics who began their careers in such positions. The tone of his account echoes the vaudevillian style that predominated in the hotels.

Moss Hart’s excerpt from his book
Act One
, “The Social Director in the Adult Summer Camp,” gives another account of the social director’s life, but from the vantage point of the adult summer camp, and mostly from an earlier era when social directors had large staffs that produced full-length variety shows and musicals every week. The adult summer camp, like the South Wind of
Marjorie Morningstar
, was a place where many people, especially men, sometimes actually slept in tents.

Harvey Jacobs’s “The Casino” is from his coming-of-age novel,
Summer on a Mountain of Spices
. Jacobs describes the hotel owner’s fascination with building a modern casino (the Catskills casino was a social hall, not a gambling place), and also leads us through a variety of the activities that went on there. He treats us to the antics of the emcee and the show he introduces, a song-and-dance team, followed by a magician. It is a very realistic account of small hotel entertainment.

Joyce Wadler’s essay, “The Fine Art of Mountain
Tummling
,” steps back and situates the performances of people like Adams and Hart in a broader context. She introduces many of the comics who built careers in the Catskills, spices her story with the jokes they told, and explains some of the underlying assumptions of Jewish humor (like the Jewish view of the universe: “Always keep one eye on the exit.”). Wadler also points to the overall hilarity of the Catskills experience that went far beyond the tummlers and comedians who were paid to be funny.