Aim For The Stars—Eddie Fisher

Today I know that Frank Sinatra is the greatest interpreter of a popular lyric. I love to listen to him and while I listen I feel I am learning something. But the first time I heard Frank I was not yet fifteen. He used to sing at Convention Hall in Philadelphia at some of the great basketball games we had then. Then I didn’t realize how good Frank was, and, not knowing (which means that I knew nothing of love or how you would interpret such emotion in a song) I figured that I was better than he was.

Something told me not to tell this to anyone who knew anything about singing. After all, who was I? Let me give you just an indication of what I was. At that time, when I thought I sang better than Sinatra, I had been combing my hair for only two years. Until I was thirteen I used to sling a cap on the back on my head and any hair that the cap didn’t hold down could stick out any way it liked.

I would sit and listen to Frank, and while he was singing I, too, would sing, but silently. I would listen to my own voice as I imagined it pouring out of me, and compare it with Frankie. What do you know—every time I sounded much better!

I thought to myself, “I’m good. Nobody knows it, but I’m good. As soon as they find out—Bam! I’ll be right on top.” And I aimed for the top.

It’s a lucky thing I had patience. It was a long time waiting before my career went Bam! More often it got stuck—Squash!

Right from the start in my life I liked to sing. There was a good reason. You all know how, in a gang of kids, every member tries to be outstanding in some way? There is the big, strong, natural athlete who comes first, of course. Then there is the daring kid, and then the funny boy, and so on down the line until you come to the shrimp whose claim to distinction is usually only a freakish one—he can imitate the noise of a car skidding around a corner, or maybe, by crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue, he looks just like Milton Berle when Milton crosses his eyes and sticks out his tongue. Well, I was a shrimp and I couldn’t imitate a skidding ear or look like Berle. But I could sing. I was most alive when I sang.

I don’t mean that the fellows used to get down on their knees and plead with me: “Ah, gee, Eddie, please sing us a song!” Come to think of it they never even asked me once. But when I did sing they would grunt as if to say that this was something I could possibly get away with. And man, how this would fill me with pride! I’d think, “Gee! I really belong, I’m one of them!” Even today I think I’d be ready to sing all night if I thought it would get me an appreciative nod from one of my old gang!

WHEN I GOT my first loot as a singer I was seven years old. I was fifteen when my voice won me my first job.

The loot was a cake. I was entered into a neighborhood competition. Every other contestant was a girl. As the only boy I came out and sang “On The Good Ship Lollipop,” and another number which I didn’t remember too well then and have certainly forgotten by today. Anyway, the mothers in the audience must have been fed up with daughters, or else they just felt sorry for me because I was the only boy; anyway they gave me the biggest hand.

When they handed me the cake I took a big bite out of it right there before I handed it to my mother to bring home. This was just a natural precaution. I had two brothers and four sisters and in our family a kid who didn’t watch out for himself could easily lose out when it came to such rare delights as cake. We wouldn’t cheat anyone out of his staples, but dessert was fair game for all. How many times have I heard someone ask at the table. “Hey! What happened to my pie (or cake or ice cream)?” and heard everybody else respond in surprised tones, “What pie (or cake or ice cream)?”

This may give the idea that we were not children of the wealthy. To keep the seven of us alive my father really had to scrounge. So did we a little.

One of my earliest recollections is of pushing a baby carriage through alleyways of the city. I was a little ashamed, not of pushing a baby carriage, but of the bag of food in it that had obviously come from the welfare office. Like a lot of families in those days we found it necessary to go on relief. Now any time I see a certain shade of blue in a shirt, and particularly if there is a white stripe effect too, it throws me right back to these days because this was the color of my shirts then—shirts that came to me from the local branch of the welfare service.

MY FIRST PROFESSIONAL job was singing on a radio show at writ in Philadelphia. The salary was fifteen cents a week—carfare. When I got so I did some pretty good shows I was raised to fifty cents a week. Bernie Rich and Joey Forman, my two best friends (and they are my best friends today and sitting not ten feet away from me as I write this in Hollywood), were on the same show with me as actors. They got the same kind of money. In time we went to five dollars, and then to seven and a half dollars and even ten.

When I am asked if I started at the bottom I think I am entitled to give them the answer I always give: “The bottomest.”

I haven’t mentioned my first pre-professional work as a singer. This was in my father’s grocery store when I was about four years old. Customers who paid cash instead of charging their purchases were entitled to ask for a song from me. The only trouble was that I was shy; it was hard for me to get started. It is to this day. My first song in a radio show, the first entrance I have to make on the stage or the nightclub floor, is a tough one.

I know from experience that you have to have a tremendous amount of self-confidence to get anywhere. How else can you keep going all through the years when it seems like you never will? As a matter of fact, I have no real sense of accomplishment, certainly no strong feeling of security, right now. Rather it seems to me that I have a finger hold on a rung somewhere on the way to the top and it will take an awful lot of struggling just to stay where I am, let alone climb any further. But that’s what I am shooting for—further. Nothing lower than the stars.

I CAN REMEMBER my father’s making a big sacrifice to get me a piano and start me learning to play. That was bad enough. But how did we both feel when after two lessons I had to give up; piano was not for me! My teacher couldn’t understand it, my father couldn’t understand it, and I didn’t get it either. But the truth was that despite having a singing voice I was a little short on the kind of brains needed to learn and produce instrumental music.

A friend of mine gave me a good tip. “Maybe this should be a lesson to you,” he said. “Concentrate on one thing only. Your voice. Stay on that one road. Forget all the others.”

That’s what I did. But, as I say, it was a long road.

In 1946 when I was seventeen I started making trips to New York with the idea of meeting song people and crashing through to something. I thought I got somewhere got to know my Voice and estimated it was worth about ten dollars to have me sing their numbers for important radio and recording artists in hopes these stars would use them. It was a job that had a certain saddening effect on me. I would sing song after song, altogether I guess up to a couple of hundred—and yet none was ever a hit! It made me realize how hard it is to catch success.

One day I sang two songs to the late Buddy Clark, “Spring In December” and “Where Flamingos Fly.”

“You demonstrate songs so well I’ll just have to take these and use them in my program,” he told me.

But nothing, just nothing, kept on happening. Nothing happened even when something happened. Something which seems big comes your Way and yet you haven’t actually gained a step. In 1948, for Instance, I was signed by CBS to be shifted into a big program at the first opportunity. Wow! Then, for a year I tried out for shows, ten of them, and for one reason or the other flopped in all of them.

Sometimes the decisions were delayed. Often I was a live candidate long enough to have my heart cracked when the final decision was made. One of the programs I auditioned for was Sing It Again, the big network show that eventually proved to be such a hit, and everyone thought I had made it. I went back to Philadelphia after the audition feeling certain I had hit.

I told my family and my friends that I expected a phone call any moment summoning me back to New York. Two nights later we were listening to the radio when we heard an announcement about the show. “Tune in next week, when CBS presents Sing It Again, starring Alan Dale!”

My father looked at me a little angrily. “Who told you you could change your name?” he asked.

“It’s changed,” I said, “but not to Alan Dale. There is a real Alan Dale and a wonderful singer. My name is mud.”

THAT WAS RADIO. In my early days I also flopped nicely in stage shows and in recording. Very few people know, and maybe I shouldn’t remind anyone, that I was supposed to be one of the singing stars in Michael Todd’s musical hit of some years back, As The Girls Go. Mr. Todd auditioned me. As a matter of fact he gave me a real chance and heard me sing on five different occasions before he made up his mind. On each of the first four times he said, “There is something there. I’m not sure. I’ll have to listen again.” After the fifth time he said, “Well, it’s definite now. You won’t do.”

Mannie Sachs, then talent head of Columbia records, told me I had nothing to worry about. “Eddie, you’ll hit so big and make so much money you won’t know what to do with it,” he said. After which I had almost a full year doing nothing but sitting outside his office and figuring how to spend my money when I got it. Mannie meant well. Eventually he would have got me started, I’m sure. But he was a busy man. Sitting there I watched Buddy Clark walk into his office, Frank Sinatra walk in, Dinah Shore walk in. But I never got in any more.

With important stars to worry about Mr. Sachs couldn’t Spare much time for me. And besides that, I was young. But that isn’t the way I figured then. It seemed to me that I had been fighting to get somewhere for years and it hurt me that around my home I was still taking, not making, as far as money was concerned.

I was still only seventeen when I got a call to come to New York again, this time to actually go to work singing with two orchestras—the Buddy Morrow band and Charlie Ventura’s. I sang only a few times with Morrow, and after four weeks with Ventura I wasn’t getting along because I didn’t fit in with his musical style. Yet the big thing was that I was singing with a band in and around Broadway; to me this was it, this was the way to the stars.

I SING LOVE songs. I have no particular style. I sing love songs and I sing them the way I feel them. This makes it difficult for me to fit in with an orchestra that has a definite style of its own and colors everything played or sung in its own way. Here was my trouble when I was with Charlie Ventura. After a while I got a hunch that it would be only a matter of time before I would be fired.

It wasn’t a happy prospect even if the job wasn’t paying much money. I was young enough not to worry too much about cash on hand. So were my friends for that matter, the boys who would come up from Philly to give me courage and make sure the New York guys were not kicking me around.

We were a pretty crazy bunch of Philadelphians, sometimes sleeping seven to the room—the little room I had taken in a Broadway hotel so I could look out of the window and be dazzled by the neon bonfires all around Times Square. I remember nights when we were broke (again) and would prowl through the Automat looking for open food windows. Quite often you would be lucky and run across an unlocked dish, usually apple pie.

There was a night when four of us were so hungry we got into a pillow fight in my room just to keep from thinking about food. Soon the place looked like a snowstorm. Worried about what the manager would say, and knowing I didn’t stand in too well since I owed at least three weeks in back rent, I tried to stuff the feathers back into the pillows. It was no use. Every time any of us moved, or even breathed, for that matter, the feathers would puff out and escape and another blizzard was on. Finally someone got an idea that seemed to make sense. “Let’s wet the feathers,” he said. “Then they won’t fly up any more.”

We did. We threw water all over the room and soaked everything. Ten billion feathers stuck to everything and most of them were still sticking when morning came. The manager didn’t throw me out of my room that morning—he just didn’t let me back in when I came home that night!

I was still with Ventura and worrying about when the ax would fall when my life was saved, you might say, and my chances for a future greatly increased, by a man by the name of Mangle—Manny Mangle. He heard me sing one night at the Post Lodge on the Boston Post Road and sent for me to come to his table. He said he thought I ought to audition for the new show at the Copacabana Club in New York. He said that if I liked the idea he would get me an audition the next day.

I AUDITIONED and I was lucky enough to beat out 200 other boys for the job—singer for the production numbers in the show. And now I was really in a great spot to be seen and discovered. For all this, of course, I could thank Mr. Mangle. Who was Mr. Mangle? A big producer? A showman friend of the Copacabana people? No. Every night when I sang at the Copacabana I would see Mr. Mangle, and seeing him would remind me that you never know who your best friend is or where your next boost is coming from. Mr. Mangle worked at the club. He was a waiter there!

Years before, walking around Philadelphia, I knew that I needed to learn about dozens of things unrelated to music before I could even get anywhere as a singer. I would have to become a person and be liked for that generally before I could hope to be recognized for any specific ability and to be helped on to achievement. And I also knew that the people who could help me were somewhere in the city and that sooner or later we would meet. I think every successful artist in the world can look back to such meetings. The man I credit with giving me my basic opportunity, in that he helped me to help myself, is Skipper Dawes, today an executive with Paul Whiteman’s organization.

I was about thirteen and Mr. Dawes was a radio producer at that time in Philadelphia. He not only gave me a berth on one of his programs, but he and his wife took considerable pains to civilize me. It was either Mr. Dawes or Mrs. Dawes who first taught me how to comb my hair. They invited me to their home, a lovely place in Brookline, and there for the first time in my life I got an idea of the beauty and refinement that fills the lives of some people every day.

And of course Mr. Dawes gave me technical help. He taught me to sing out, to transmit into tones the feeling conveyed by the lyric—to live the song.

BUT WHILE you meet people who will help you, their intent does not always mean they will always have the right notions about you. One of my early music teachers, Mr. Jay Speck of Southern High School in Philadelphia, who meant well, I know, was convinced that I would lose my singing voice before maturity.

To go on in the face of a prediction like this isn’t easy; I had to be really pigheaded in my confidence in myself. It seems to me that there is no such thing as having just a feeling you can make good—it’s got to be a strong feeling that overrides everything else!

Incidentally, Mr. Speck had me come down to Southern last winter and sing for the students. After my song I thought I’d kid him so I told the kids about his prediction that I would lose my voice. He quickly ad libbed, “And what did I tell you?”—and made me feel as dumb as I used to be when I was in his class.

But kidding aside, I think most performers in this business will tell you that success depends pretty much on these three things: having a goal and setting it high; willingness to take repeated disappointments and keep fighting back; and, most important of all, being lucky enough to get the backing of people who are able to help you. I know that in my case, I am as much the product of these people as I am of any efforts of my own.

That’s why in any appraisal of myself I also must think of my present manager, Milton Blackstone, of Mr. Dawes and his wonderful understanding of my handicaps and inadequacies early in my career, of Manny Mangle, Bernie Rich and Joey Foreman, of Mrs.Grossinger at Grossinger’s resort in the Catskills, where I got so much valuable experience, and of Eddie Cantor who heard me sing there and gave me my biggest break. There were many more, too, who gave me a boost just when it was most needed. I’m thinking now way back to “My Papa” and his customers who used to come to his grocery store. They were the ones whose smiles first gave me the idea that instead of annoying people with the loud noises that came from my throat I could actually please them. I’m still surprised about that!

THE END

—BY EDDIE FISHER

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE DECEMBER 1954