This is Minnie the Moocher, the 1932 Betty Boop cartoon featuring Cab Calloway and his orchestra — and I’ve got one of those Evanier Name Drop stories that some (not all) of you love. I’m not sure what year this was — ’80 or maybe ’81 — but I was writing a pilot for a Saturday morning cartoon series for ABC. They flew me back to New York for what turned out to be about a 45-minute conference that we could have had on the phone. I left the meeting a bit bewildered but hey, a free trip to New York is a free trip to New York and they’d flown me there first class.
Just so I don’t keep you in suspense: Some weeks later, I handed in the pilot script, everyone said they loved it and that it was fabulous and a sure “go” and that was the last I heard about it. Around 2010, I began to give up hope they’d do anything with the script. But hey, it’s only been 45 0r 46 years so maybe they’re waiting for just the perfect moment.
On the flight to New York, the man sitting next to me was reading a screenplay and I was reading a screenplay and at some point, we noticed we were both reading screenplays. I said to him, “I hope yours is better than this one is” and he laughed and introduced himself as George Folsey, Jr. I introduced myself and said, “Your father was the cinematographer on the first two Marx Brothers movies and about a million other great films.”
He liked that I knew that and we started talking about his father — one of the all-time great cinematographers. That conversation segued to what each of us was doing now — as show biz conversations invariably do — and what he was doing was, of course, way more interesting than anything I’d been doing. He’d recently been the Associate Producer and head film editor on The Blues Brothers, the 1980 film starring Belushi, Aykroyd and a lot of wrecked police cars. He was on his way back to N.Y. to record Cab Calloway for…
Well, I’m not sure. Mr. Calloway had a very nice part in that movie but the film had been out for some time. My memory is that they needed to redub some lines to remove some naughty words so the film could be shown on airplanes…but I’m not sure the legendary Mr. Calloway said anything naughty in the movie. Whatever the reason, George was going to be in a recording studio the next day with Cab Calloway recording something short relating to the film and he invited me to drop by and meet him. Some invites, you just don’t decline.
So the next day, I was at a recording studio on 45th Street in Manhattan — I may be off by a block or two — keeping Cab Calloway company until they were ready to record a few lines. They’d told him it would take ten minutes but they didn’t tell him they’d make him wait a half-hour until they finished with something else. Cab — he asked me to call him that — was not complaining. He was very happy he’d been asked to be in the film and even more happy with what he’d been paid.
We talked mainly about two things. One was his run on Broadway playing Horace Vandergelder to Pearl Bailey as Dolly in Hello, Dolly! It was a high point in his career that landed him on the cover of Life magazine when there was a Life magazine and being on its cover was a very big deal. He had members of his family in the show too and he got his photo with then-President Lyndon Johnson and he was still, all those years later, beaming about that.
The other topic was this cartoon. He said he didn’t really have any idea what he was getting himself into but back then, when someone was willing to pay you to perform, you performed. He was stunned (in a good way) when he saw the finished cartoon and finally understood what they were doing with that performance. And he said it kind of cemented his connection to that song and it was why he had to perform it all the time after that. He said, approximately, “Some dates, I wouldn’t have gotten out of the club alive if I hadn’t done ‘Minnie!'”
I mentioned rotoscoping and I had to explain to him what that was; how it’s when the animation is done by having an artist trace, almost frame by frame, the action of a human being in a film. Mr. Calloway’s unique style of dancing was traced for the cartoon from live-action footage of him.
But it was a great conversation and I don’t know why in the twenty-five (!) years I’ve been doing this blog, I never wrote about it before. He was just a happy, charming guy delighted to be in-demand and working at his age. I just looked up his birthdate to figure out how old he was that day and was startled to see he was about the age I am now. I sure don’t feel almost 74 and I’m sure he didn’t either.
I’ve had many moments in my life when I wish I’d been wearing a body cam or at least an audio recorder because there was a conversation that should have been preserved so it could be shared with others. It was not the information that mattered. That was all probably stuff he said many times to others who could record or transcribe it.
What you would have enjoyed is the personal charm of the man that was evident even though was not on stage, not in front of audience, just happy to be talking to (basically) a random stranger. A lot of performers can turn that on in front of an audience, especially when it’s part of a paying gig. It’s nice when you see it’s real.
That evening, he was going with a group to some restaurant near the Apollo Theater in Harlem and then he was going to make some sort of “stand up and take a bow” appearance at the Apollo in support of some young (I think) performer. He asked me if I’d like to join his party. I told him I had a date. He said, “Well, bring her along!” I said I had tickets to a Broadway show she desperately wanted to see.
I said earlier here, “Some invites, you just don’t decline.” I should have added that sometimes you do and you live to regret it. I’m not sure what I was thinking…maybe that he really didn’t mean it; that it was just his nature to extend invites like that. But he was really — here’s that word again — charming. And full of life. I think you can sense some of that in this cartoon even though they turned him into some sort of fat ghost walrus and other bizarre creatures…
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