The Eddie Cantor Story

This absorbing biography chronicles the life and work of one of the most important entertainers of the twentieth century. Eddie Cantor (1892-1964) starred in theater, film, radio, and television. His immense popularity across a variety of media, his pride in his Jewish heritage, and his engagement with pressing political issues distinguished him from other headliners of his era. Paying equal attention to Cantor's humor and politics, Weinstein documents his significance as a performer, philanthropist, and activist. Many show business figures quietly shed their Jewish backgrounds or did not call attention to the fact that they were Jewish. Cantor was different. He addressed the vital issues of his times, including acculturation, national identity, and antisemitism. He was especially forceful in opposing Nazism and paid a price for this activism in 1939, when a sponsor cancelled the actor's radio program. In this carefully researched book, Weinstein uncovers sketches and routines filled with Jewish phrases, allusions, jokes, songs, and stories. Cantor frequently did not mark this material as "Jewish," relying instead on attentive audiences to interpret his coded performances. Illustrated with thirty photographs, The Eddie Cantor Story examines the evolution, impact, and legacy of Cantor's performance style. His music and comedy not only shaped the history of popular entertainment, but also provide a foundation for ongoing efforts to redefine Jewish culture and build community in contemporary America.

A retelling, with additional material for the years since 1928, of the popular vaudeville, radio and TV comedian's life previously chronicled in "My life is in your hands."

In an era dominated by the likes of W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy, no entertainer was more popular over a long period of time than Eddie Cantor. At various times he was the most celebrated performer on the vaudeville circuit, on Broadway, and in radio, television and film. Today many film historians ignore the contributions of Cantor. Unlike his contemporaries, he was never recognized for a comedic style. Instead he relied on his high energy performances to entertain audiences on their level. He tailored his career to give his fans what they wanted, and he was wildly successful at doing just that. This is a comprehensive look at the career of the consummate show businessman.

"The heart of David Weinstein's book examines DuMont's programs and personalities, including Dennis James, Captain Video, Morey Amsterdam, Jackie Gleason and The Honeymooners, Ernie Kovacs, and Rocky King, Detective. Weinstein uses rare kinescopes, archival photographs, exclusive interviews, trade journal articles, and corporate documents to tell the story of a "forgotten network" that helped invent the very business of network television."--Jacket.

Entertainer Eddie Cantor (1892-1964) shared the stage with the likes of W.C. Fields and Fanny Price, founded the March of Dimes, and was the only American entertainer to reign successively as the biggest star on Broadway, in the movies, and on radio. This biography recreates Cantor's extraordinary journey from New York's Lower East Side to the glorious era of Broadway and Hollywood in the 1930s. A few bandw photographs. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

American comedian and entertainer Eddie Cantor relates his humorous take on the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

A dreamlike, evocative reckoning with a lost epoch in popular culture--and with old, weird America. At the heart of American Vaudeville is one strange, unsettling fact: for nearly fifty years, from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, vaudeville was everywhere--then, suddenly, it was nowhere. This book tells the story of what was once the most popular form of entertainment in the country using lists, creation myths, thumbnail biographies, dreams, and obituaries. A lyric history--part social history, part song--American Vaudeville sits at the nexus between poetry, experimental nonfiction, and, because it includes historic images, art books. Geoffrey Hilsabeck's book grows out of extensive archival research. Rather than arranging that research--the remains of vaudeville--into a realistic picture or tidy narrative, Hilsabeck dreams vaudeville back into existence, drawing on photographs, letters, joke books, reviews, newspaper stories, anecdotes, and other material gathered from numerous archives, as well as from memoirs by vaudeville performers like Buster Keaton, Eva Tanguay, and Eddie Cantor. Some of this research is presented as-is, a letter from a now forgotten vaudeville performer to her booking agent, for example; some is worked up into brief scenes and biographies; and some is put to even more imaginative uses, finding new life in dialogues and prose poems. American Vaudeville pulls the past into the present and finds in the beauty and carnivalesque grotesqueness of vaudeville a fitting image of American life today.