Audition by Barbara Walters Page A

lighting booth.
    As I said, in the first year of the Latin Quarter, my dad didn’t hire big stars. He wasn’t sure he could afford them. But the second year Jimmy Durante played the club. So did Sophie Tucker, known as the “Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” belting out her theme song, “You’re Gonna Miss Your Red Hot Mama Some of These Days.” Milton Berle played there, too. I saw his act so many times I can still do it practically in my sleep. Want to hear the opening lines? He would walk up to the standing microphone, touch it, then jump back as if in shock and say, “I’ve just been goosed by Westinghouse.”
    By the way, this early education has never come in particularly handy. And I never did learn how to maneuver those huge white feather fans that the scantily clad Sally Rand, a very well-known exotic dancer, swished back and forth in her famous peekaboo fan dance.
    One of my other favorite acts was not well known. His name was Emil Boreo. He spoke with a heavy accent and did an act that seems quite odd to me today. He wore a soft felt hat with a big brim and by changing the brim, said he could be anyone. Here, as I remember it more than sixty years later, is the opening of his act: “It’s not what I do, it’s not what I say, it’s the way I wear my hat. I can be most anyone with a twist of my brim like that.” Then he would turn that hat into a Frenchman’s beret or an Englishman’s bowler. (How come no one wants me to do his act today?)
    Then there was the brilliant Spanish ventriloquist who years later many readers will remember from the Ed Sullivan Show , Señor Wences. I can do his routine, too. He would make a fist and, with his thumb around his fingers, color his closed finger with lipstick for a mouth, make two “eyes” with black chalk, and create his so-called little friend named Johnny, or, as Señor Wences pronounced the name, “Yonnie.” Yonnie was fresh and funny, and he tormented the kind, dignified Señor Wences, who also had another talking companion, a head in a wooden box. Every time Señor Wences opened the box, Yonnie would say, “Close the box,” and the head would say, “Open the box.” I am not making this up. I guess I should also tell you that I managed to learn all this and still pass all my tests at school.
    But the real crowd-pleaser, as usual, was my father’s parade of gorgeous showgirls, who would walk around the stage wearing huge multicolored headdresses, and little else. Complete nudity was as illegal as gambling in Miami Beach, and these gorgeous Amazons wore tiny sequined “pasties” to hide their nipples and used feathers, sequins, and sometimes little fur muffs to cover their G-strings. One of the sensations at an early Palm Island Latin Quarter show was a Chinese girl who carried a real little black kitten in a fur-lined muff over her private parts. In my innocence I fixated on the kitten and wanted to take it home.
    I also loved the dancers or “ponies,” who would strut their stuff on the stage, whirling, high-kicking, doing my father’s version of the cancan before dropping to the floor in a split. I tried that routine at home once and practically dismembered myself.
    My father had three “golden rules” for his girls: (1) Do your best show even if it is only a rehearsal. (2) Don’t get tan (a rule inspired by Twinnie, one of the showgirls, who loved to sun herself on the roof of the Palm Island Club, which set her apart from her pale twin sister, Winnie, in the show’s “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers.” “Your father didn’t want to have a Chocolate Soldier and a Vanilla Soldier,” Twinnie told me years later). Rule number three? Don’t get fat.
    I saw all this through the prism of a child’s eyes. It took me years to recognize that my father was a sorcerer of magic and fantasy, although the audiences got it from the beginning. What I did learn, at this young age, was that behind these fantasy figures were real people. They may have been