Derek Malcolm's century of filmFilm This article is more than 73 years oldAl Jolson dies on crest of a wave
This article is more than 73 years oldAl Jolson died in San Francisco last night too late to hit the headlines of the morning papers, but in the evening papers to-day he swept everything before him, including President Truman at the fifth anniversary of the United Nations.
At sixty-four he was the luckiest man in show business. He went from minstrel show to blackface, from vaudeville to Broadway before he hit a fabulous prosperity as the most sentimental of all sentimental singers, a poor Russian cantor's son daubed with burnt cork and down on one knee sobbing for the "mammy" he had never known in a south that nobody ever knew.
For twenty dazzling years he was "as corny as Kansas in August, high as a flag on the fourth of July." He knew it, he revelled in it, and then the fashion slumped. Jazz overtook ragtime, vaudeville languished, the "era of wonderful nonsense" exploded as flat as a bottle of Texas Guinan's forty-dollar-a-bottle imitation champagne. Jolson was out on the sidewalk and soon out in the hinterland picking up one-night fees in crummy night clubs a thousand miles from the Broadway he had ruled.
First "all-talking" picture
His last brief vogue was after he had starred in 1927 in "The Jazz Singer," the first full-length "all-talking," all-squawking picture. He had little to offer to the fast-maturing sound film, but he bawled and whinnied for a while over the equally adolescent radio networks. Then radio too broke through the creaking stereotypes of vaudeville back-chat and old Kentucky homes into the vertiginous comedy of the Marx Brothers, the whimsicality of Jack Benny, the relaxed and urbane mockery of the Bing Crosby show. By the late thirties Jolson was the most thorough has-been in the American theatre.
During the war he tried to pick himself up again but there were few takers. Only a Hollywood producer, mulling over the ups and downs of Jolson's life, took what was thought to be a suicidal risk in filming a movie of it. It was one of the box-office champions of 1946-7. It inspired a sequel, made famous an obscure movie actor who impersonated Jolson, and catapulted Jolson himself back to Broadway, to the radio and to the big money.
Asked how he had planned his come-back, he replied: "That was no come-back, I just couldn't get a job." Once again he was called "the world's greatest entertainer." He was a guest star on every star radio programme. For a reason no one has ever satisfactorily explained, his records, old and new, started to sweep the hit parade and sell in the tens and hundreds of thousands. An enforced bachelor after three unsuccessful marriages, he married again, a lovely 21-year-old brunette. He gave a banquet for her, "only because it'll give me a chance to show her how I work with an audience. She's too young to have seen me." A guest congratulated him on his pretty daughter. "Mister," Jolson said, "she's too young to be my daughter. She's my wife."
His death
He had one last hour of glory. He offered to fly to Korea and entertain the troops hemmed in on the United Nations precarious August bridgehead. The troops yelled for his appearance. He went down on his knee again and sang "mammy," and the troops wept and cheered. When he was asked what Korea was like he warmly answered, "I am going to get back my income tax returns and see if I paid enough."
He had been back only a month and last night was in a San Francisco hotel, on his way to Hollywood to be the guest on Bing Crosby's radio show. It was ten o'clock. He was playing gin rummy with three friends. He felt a little off colour and asked a friend to go out and get him some bicarbonate of soda. He lay down. Before they called the doctor, he said, "It looks like the end." The friends ridiculed his scare but Jolson remarked that he "had no pulse." He invited the doctor to "pull up a chair and hear a story or two." Then he said, "Hell, Truman had only one hour with MacArthur. I had two." A few minutes later he died.
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