Chapter One Sophie Tucker The Last of the Red-hot Mamas Sophie Tucker peered from behind the curtain. It was two o''clock, show time, at Tony Pastor''s Theatre in New York City, where big-time agents came to look for new acts of vaudeville. The seats were empty! "What''s the matter?" she asked a stagehand. "It''s always like this," he said. "They don''t start coming in till after two-fifteen." At 2:28 the pianist played the introduction to her first song, and Sophie went out and started to sing. She was overwhelmed by the sudden tramp of feet coming down the aisles, the rattle of wooden seats as they were folded open, and the talking and laughter of arriving patrons. She stopped singing.
The piano fell silent. Her robust voice shot across the footlights. "What for you-all so late gettin'' in hyar? Hyar I am all dressed up and with some most special songs you-all ain''t never heard yet. Don''t you-all know you''re keeping the show waitin''?" She got a big laugh. What''s more, she got the audience''s attention. After five songs, the audience clamored for more. Sophie wondered later, "Where did I get the nerve to holler out like that to a New York audience?" If there was one thing Sophie Tucker was never short on, it was nerve. Nerve propelled her from her family''s restaurant in Connecticut, where she waited on tables and sang the occasional song, to New York City and show business.
Eventually, nerve got her into big-time vaudeville, and not just as one of fifteen or sixteen acts in a show but as a "headliner" -- one of a handful of performers who saw their names shining in electric lights on theater marquees across the country. Her timing could not have been better. In 1908, when Sophie was twenty-one and shouting down the audience at Pastor''s Theatre, vaudeville was fast approaching its peak as the most popular form of entertainment in America. Nearly every town had at least one vaudeville theater where traveling troupes performed a variety show at very low prices. People went once, even twice a week. And why not? For a quarter or fifty cents, you might see a strong man who could tear a telephone book in half; a boxing kangaroo; a pair of comedians; a one-act play; eight dancing girls; a troupe of talented mules; or a female singer in a glamorous gown. Some twenty thousand vaudevillians were traveling the railroads on their way from one theater to the next. Among them was bawdy songstress Eva Tanguay (whose theme song was "I Don''t Care"); escape artist Harry Houdini; the brother-and-sister dance act of Fred and Adele Astaire; Will Rogers, the cowboy who roped a horse onstage; ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his smart-aleck dummy, Charlie; and "The Twelve Speed Maniacs," who assembled a Ford automobile in two minutes flat.
And there was Sophie Tucker, whose big, belting voice "put the trombone in its place and made the electric lights flicker" -- or so it was said. Sophie was a large, buxom woman. She wore her golden hair piled on her head and, once she was earning big money, favored extravagant clothes: long, flowing dresses, dainty shoes with ribbon bows, lots of diamond jewelry, and a feather headdress that shot up eighteen inches into the air. She always looked elegant, even queenly. And yet in her manner she was anything but aloof. She was open and kindhearted, a pal to everyone. She could tell bawdy jokes without offending people -- important in a clean, family entertainment like vaudeville. Sophie was born on January 13, 1887, somewhere in Poland.
Her mother was emigrating from Russia to America with her baby son when she went into labor in a wagon. The wagon driver left them by the side of the road. Fortunately, people in a nearby house took in mother and son, and delivered Sophie. Three months later, the family joined Sophie''s father in America. To evade Russian authorities, he had changed his last name from Kalish to Abuza. He settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where he opened Abuza''s Home Restaurant. Everybody in the Abuza family worked. Sophie got up at three o''clock in the morning to wipe the frost off the salami and bologna and to slice bread for sandwiches.
She wrapped her feet and stuffed the front of her dress with newspapers to keep out the cold. Then she did housework, ran errands, and peeled vegetables for soup before going to school. If she fell asleep every morning in geography, she was wide awake during music class, and was often called on to lead the singing. After school she waited on tables. One day when she was about eleven, Sophie sang "Break the News to Mother," a popular song about a dying soldier, for the customers. The song brought tears to many eyes and extra tips to Sophie. Her father got excited and told his wife, "You see, someday, with that great big voice of hers, she''ll make big money for us." At the city park concerts, Sophie began to accompany -- on the piano with one finger -- her younger sister Anna, who sang.
Then something marvelous happened. "I was going on thirteen, and already I weighed about one hundred forty-five pounds," Sophie recalled. "I was gawky and self-conscious. Gradually, at the concerts, I began to hear calls for ''the fat girl.'' Then I would jump up from the piano stool, forgetting all about my size, and work to get all the laughs I could get." She picked up jokes at Poli''s Vaudeville Theater in her hometown. She learned songs from the show people who came into the restaurant, who scribbled the lyrics, not the music, on scraps of paper for her. "I couldn''t have read the notes if I had had them," Sophie said.
"And I had no need of them. I was born with a quick and true ear." When she was about seventeen, a young man named Louis Tuck asked Sophie to a dance -- her first. Two months later, she married him. They had a son, Bert. Tuck worked as a driver for a horse-drawn beer truck, but brought home little money because he gambled. He, Sophie, and their son moved in with her parents, and Sophie went back to working in the restaurant. When she told Tuck to take care of his family and get a better job or leave, he left.
The marriage had lasted two years. Sophie, meanwhile, saved one hundred dollars from singing and, in the fall of 1906, she begged two weeks'' vacation and left baby Bert with her parents. She had no intention of returning. She wrote her parents from New York City: "I have decided to go into show business. I have decided that I can do big things and have definitely made up my mind that you will never stand behind a stove and cook any more, and every comfort that I can bring you both I am going to do, and I know I can do it, if you will let me alone." Sophie found a room for five dollars a week, including breakfast, and a restaurant that would let her sing for her supper. She changed her name to Sophie Tucker, because "Mrs. Tuck didn''t sound right for a singer," she said.
Sophie was completely dedicated, even to a job that paid only in food, not cash. "Every morning I turned out of bed and marched myself up to the music publishers'' and got the pianists to go over new songs with me." "Got something new, boys?" was her standard greeting. Already she had formed the philosophy that was to serve her for fifty years. "From those days to this my motto has been: ''Get something new. Keep fresh. Don''t get stale, singing the same songs.'' I made it my job to learn all the new popular numbers as they came out and to have these with me.
" Sophie had her eye on German Village, a classy restaurant on West Fortieth Street, that employed fifteen to twenty singers. When the manager told her she was too young, she bought a new outfit "on time" (paying one dollar a week until the full payment was reached), put her hair up, and got the job. She sang as many as one hundred songs a night for fifteen dollars a week plus tips. True to her word, she sent a weekly money order to her family. Sophie then landed a spot on Chris Brown''s amateur night, a place far uptown on 125th Street, where newcomers could be seen by agents booking the vaudeville circuit, and her career took a sharp turn. As she was about to go onstage, Mr. Brown said, "This one''s so big and ugly the crowd out front will razz her. Better get some cork and black her up.
She''ll kill ''em." An assistant quickly rubbed burnt cork on Sophie''s face, ears, and neck. He painted on a grotesque mouth with lipstick, tied a red bandanna over her hair, and thrust a pair of black cotton gloves on her hands. Just like that, Sophie became a blackface comedian. "Blacking up" to look like a Negro was a popular vaudeville tradition, practiced by whites and blacks alike. Blackface actors performed caricatures of blacks, typically a bumbling, ignorant type known as a "coon." Singers who blackened their faces and sang Southern songs were called "coon shouters." Today it''s hard to find the humor in such openly racist gestures, but at the time, blackface had appeal to both races -- for different reasons.
Anyone, black or white, could enjoy feeling superior to a fool, but black audiences got an extra kick out of seeing white folks'' "imitations" of black people. When the actor was black, the humor became more complex: Blacks laughed at a black blackface actor making fun of the white blackface actor who imitated black folks. "All right, you''re on," said the stagehand. Sophie felt sick with fright. The pianist thumped out the opening chords, jolting her out of her fear. She strode onstage and sang three songs, which the audience liked so much, they refused to let her go until she had sung three more. On the way home that night Sophie recognized a booking agent on the subway train. She went up to him, her f.