Tucker, Sophie (1884–1966)

American entertainer, the "Last of the Red Hot Mamas," whose career began in the days of vaudeville and ended only with her death in the 1960s. Born Sophia Kalish (later known as Sophia Abuza) on January 13, 1884, in Russia; died on February 9, 1966, in New York City; second of four children and the first of two girls of Charles Abuza (a restaurateur originally named Kalish) and Jennie (Yacha) Abuza (originally Kalish); attended Brown School in Hartford, Connecticut; married Louis Tuck (a beer-wagon driver), in 1903 (divorced 1913); married Frank Westphal (a pianist), in 1914 (divorced 1919); married Albert Lackey (a personal manager), in 1928 (divorced 1933); children: (first marriage) one son, Bert.

Theater includes:

Ziegfeld Follies of 1909 (1909); Hello, Alexander (1919); Earl Carroll's Vanities of 1924 (1924); Leave It to Me (1938); The High Kickers (1941). As a radio singer, had her own program, "Sophie Tucker and Her Show" (1938–39).

Selected filmography:

Honky Tonk (1928); Little Red Hot Schoolhouse (1932); Gay Love (1934); Broadway Highlights #1 (1935); Broadway Melody of 1928 (1937); Thoroughbreds Don't Cry (1937); Follow the Boys (1944); The Joker is Wild (All the Way, 1957); The Heart of Show Business (1957).

A show business legend, Sophie Tucker was born in Russia in 1884, began her career in vaudeville in 1906, and sang and kibitzed her way through the next six decades, performing at New York's Latin Quarter just four months before her death in 1966. The self-proclaimed "Last of the Red-Hot Mamas," Tucker created a flamboyant, frequently racy act that capitalized on her music-hall voice and rotund frame. Throughout her career, she altered her performance as time and circumstances dictated, believing that above everything, a performer must remain current. ("I'm the 3-D Mama with the Big Wide Screen," she bellowed to a new generation of fans late in her career.) Her appeal was universal and enduring; audiences flocked to see her even after she began losing her voice and had to "talk" her way through her songs.

Tucker was literally born on the road. Her mother Jennie Kalish , a Russian Jew, gave birth to her while traveling by truck across Poland to the Baltic, to join her husband in America. On his own journey to the United States, Tucker's father, on the lam from the Russian army, began calling himself Charles Abuza, a name he stole from an Italian traveling companion who died during the trip. "Don't ask me what the United States immigration officers made of an Italian who couldn't speak anything but Russian and Yiddish; but it was as 'Charles Abuza' that Papa got into the country, and found a job in Boston," Tucker wrote in her autobiography Some of These Days.

The "Abuzas" stayed in Boston for seven years, then moved to Hartford, Connecticut, when Charles bought a restaurant there. The enterprise involved all four of the Abuza children, and Tucker grudgingly served as dishwasher and waitress while she dreamed of a career in show business. She sometimes sang for the customers, receiving encouragement from some of the show-business regulars, who also wrote down new songs for her and occasionally took her to the theater. She would then try out the ideas she picked up from the shows at the amateur concerts in Riverside Park, although she was shy about getting up on stage because of her weight. "Gradually, at the concerts I began to hear calls for 'the fat girl,'" she recalls in her autobiography. "Then I would jump up from the piano stool, forgetting all about my size, and work to get all the laughs I could get."

At 16, to escape the drudgery of the kitchen more than anything else, Tucker eloped with Louis Tuck, a high school beau. After a year and the birth of son Bert, the couple encountered financial difficulties and moved back with the Abuzas. They subsequently separated, then divorced.

In 1906, Sophie left her son with her family and moved to New York to break into show business. Changing her name to Tucker, she sang in restaurants and haunted the offices of music publishers to make contacts and get new material. She got her first break in an amateur show, but it was costly. In her autobiography, she tells of her experience auditioning for the show at the 125th Street Theater. "This one's so big and ugly the crowd out front will razz her," the manager shouted. "Better get some cork and black her up." Tucker hated the idea of blackface, but was convinced she needed it because of her size and her plain features. She made her professional New York debut on December 9 of that year, at the 116th Street Music Hall, and then toured the vaudeville circuit for the next two years in black-face. One night, her luggage did not arrive in time for a performance, so she went on without the disguise. The audience loved her, and she never appeared in blackface again.

Tucker's career inched forward again in 1909, with a spot in the Ziegfeld Follies, starring Nora Bayes , but she was fired during the run of the show when Bayes objected to Sophie's show-stopping number. After a brief dry spell, she had the good fortune to hook up with William Morris, who managed his own vaudeville circuit of American Music Halls across the country. Tucker began touring the circuit with great success, particularly in Chicago, where she was billed as "The Mary Garden of Ragtime." It was during this period that she began to introduce songs filled with the double-entendre which came to be associated with her (tunes like "Nobody Loves a Fat Girl, But Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love" and "You've Got To See Mama Ev'ry Night"). "The innocents couldn't find a thing in it to object to," she said, "and the others would find a belly laugh in every line." In 1910, she struck a recording deal with Edison. One of her earliest recordings, the Sheldon Brooks song "Some of These Days," eventually became her theme song.

In August 1914, Tucker arrived at the pinnacle of her vaudeville career, playing the famed Palace Theater in New York, where according to one critic, "She just walked out and owned the place." Despite her success, she continued to alter her act, keeping up with the fashions and changes within her own life. As jazz began to replace ragtime, she organized a band, "The Five Kings of Syncopation" and performed as the

"Queen of Jazz." Around the time of her father's death, she began incorporating sentimental ballads into the act. To further enhance their messages, she started to dramatized the songs, introducing them with skits and monologues. Later, Tucker disbanded her jazz backup and began performing with two piano players: Ted Shapiro and Jack Carol. Shapiro remained with her for the rest of her career.

By the mid 1920s, Tucker was at the peak of her popularity, both in the United States and in England, where she first appeared in 1922 at the London Hippodrome in Round in Fifty. She continued to visit England frequently, particularly as vaudeville began to lose its foothold in the United States during the 1930s. (Tucker was never as popular on the Continent, and was once booed off the stage in Paris while singing one of her most popular numbers, "My Yiddishe Mama.") In New York, she owned a nightclub, Sophie Tucker's Playground, and headlined Earl Carroll's Vanities of 1924. In 1928, she added six Tivoli Girls to her vaudeville act, as well as her son Bert.

Between 1929 and 1945, Tucker also made eight movies (two in England) and appeared on Broadway in Leave It to Me (1931) and The High Kickers (1941). She was also active in radio, guesting on various shows and even hosting her own 15-minute series, "Sophie Tucker and Her Show" (1938–39). With the advent of television, she poured herself into spangled gowns and made the rounds of the variety shows like Ed Sullivan's "Toast of the Town." Tucker always preferred live performance over radio and television, however, objecting to censorship of her more risqué songs and banter. "I couldn't even say 'hell' or 'damn,'" she lamented about radio, "and nothing, honey, is more expressive than the way I say 'hell' or 'damn.'"

After divorcing Louis Tuck in 1913, Tucker married Frank Westphal, her pianist at the time, in 1914. That union ended in divorce, as did a third marriage to Al Lackey, a fan who became her personal manager. Early on, shortly after her first divorce, Tucker reached the conclusion that her difficulty with men stemmed from her independence, her ability to earn her own way in an age when women relied on men to provide for them. "Something happens to a women when she does that," she wrote. "She may kid herself that it's just temporary, only until the right man turns up, and then she'll throw her arms around his neck and be a clinging vine all the rest of her life. It doesn't work that way. Once you start on the independent circuit, you're committed for life."

In addition to supporting her husbands, her mother, and her son, Tucker was also generous to a number of philanthropic endeavors. In 1945, she established the Sophie Tucker Foundation and in 1955 endowed a chair in theater arts at Brandeis University. Profits from 1,500 deluxe $25 editions of her autobiography were split between theatrical and other charities. Tucker also gave of her time, becoming active in the American Federation of Actors (AFA) and serving as its president in 1938. (The AFA subsequently joined with Actors' Equity to form Equity's American Guild of Variety Artists.)

As late as the mid-1960s, Tucker embarked on a long and successful tour with Ted Lewis and George Jessel. In 1966, she had performed two nights of her four-week engagement at the Latin Quarter when she entered the hospital for treatment of an intestinal inflammation. She came home to recuperate, but died on February 9 of lung and kidney failure. The singer had never once given a thought to retiring from the profession she so adored. "Show business has been my life," she once said. "I wouldn't have had any other. It is the life I always wanted."

sources:

Current Biography 1945. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1945.

McHenry, Robert, ed. Famous American Women. NY: Dover, 1980.

Parish, James Robert, and Michael R. Pitts. Hollywood Songsters. NY: Garland, 1991.

Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980.

Tucker, Sophie, with Dorothy Giles. Some of These Days, 1945.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts