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RADIO STARS
WITH EDDIE CANTOR
With his wife, Ida Tobias, and his five daughters. Five (5). Eddie fell in love with Ida when he was in his 'teens. For years her parents objected to him.
Durante, to name a few.
Recently, I asked Eddie Cantor why. He said:
"The line between comedy and tragedy is a hairline. When you looked up at those drab swarming tenements, at the misery all about you, you had to laugh — or die!"
There was a special reason in Eddie's case: his size. Of average stature now, he was then a wisp of a lad, especially for that neighborhood, where fists were the law. And when Eddie's fists failed him, he had to make his wits serve.
VOU may have noticed that the keynote of his capers ' is impudence; a flip defiance of powers or persons stronger than himself. Like his famous scene with the bone-breaking osteopath.
That impudence brought him through the hurly-burly of his boyhood, with its street brawls and its gang fights.
"Those gang fights — oo!" he says, and shudders today at the thought.
Only once did it fail him. It was the time Eddie found out you can't kid a brickbat. The brickbats flew thick at street fights. One came sailing out of the air one time — he never knew where from. It smacked him on the forehead and stretched him flat, leaving a dent which he carries to this day. No little nick, mind you, but a cleft from eyebrows to hairline.
The fact that he survived at all shows that Eddie, with all of his hopping and howling, was a tough kid.
The same impudence, later, on the stage, screen, and over the radio microphones, made Eddie a couple of fortunes, one of which he still has.
Eddie was born down there on the East Side, in a two
room ^^^^M flat on ^^^^^ crowded, teeming Eldridge Street. His mother, of whom he only knew from her photograph that she had large dark eyes, died shortly after his birth.
His father, a sentimental, discouraged violinist, grew even more discouraged then, and soon died likewise, of pneumonia, or a broken heart, or both. He bequeathed to Eddie one battered, second-hand violin which Eddie never used, and a priceless sense of rhythm which he has used ever since.
The guiding spirit in his life thenceforth was his maternal grandmother, Esther, who had arrived on the scene from Russia a few months before at her daughter's request, in a final desperate effort to stem the last outgoing trickle of the Cantor fortunes. From the time Michael Cantor died, Grandma Esther was mother, father, and probation officer to {Continued on page 41)
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