Chicago 1960: Boot Camp for Egos and insecurities. Part #1.

poor georgie’s almanack      George Kroloff   May 24, 2018.   410 words. 

Egos and insecurities boot camp.  Part #1.

Without Checks There Would Have been No Balances.

Chicago, 1960.  I was 25, a Depression baby, working for myself with no savings and, more than anything else, I feared going broke.  My dad was sick.  My mom was a full time care giver and I was contributing to their nearly depleted living expenses.

Most weekday afternoons people turned their radio dials to 820 and listened to station WAIT’s Phil Lind Show for a dose of show business gossip.  I was Phil’s booker, the guy who sought out and scheduled guests for in-studio interviews.  

Lind, a balding, former professional singer, sometimes came close, but never reached the line of fawning over celebrities.  Many of them (Carol Channing comes to mind) seemed to genuinely enjoy reminiscing with him.  Phil spoke in a conversational tone.  His career depended on being liked and I liked him.  His checks didn’t bounce.

Separately, I promoted a small, somewhat seedy, gangster-run nightclub that was cover for an illegal gambling establishment upstairs.  It smelled like the lions’ cages at the Lincoln Park zoo.  The club featured insecure singers and comics who were long, long past their prime.  One act was a silent movie star who peaked in the mid 20s.

Fortunately, no worry about checks bouncing there.  The two hulking knuckle-draggers who claimed to run the joint would not sign anything on paper, like a check.  They dealt in cash.  At about 2 am the second Tuesday each month, one would methodically count out $300 in fives and tens and shove the wad into my eager outstretched hands.  

It doesn’t matter that I can’t remember their names, they probably were aliases anyway.  I never knew what demons lurked behind their steely, piercing eyes.  To me, they spoke softly and carried a fearful big stick.

At the other end of my press agent spectrum were assignments from Harry Zelzer, the legendary Chicago impresario who booked only the toniest halls.  Supposedly the publicity I generated helped fill seats for some of the biggest stars in the showbiz firmament … Leonard Bernstein, Harry Belafonte, etc.

He paid me peanuts, but I had free tickets to distribute and usually the shows in his office were as good as the stage performances.  The diminutive Zelzer's normal-sized wife totally lorded over him.  In turn, Mr. Zelzer had his own big schtick to threaten me.  He yelled.  

“Kroloff,” he’d bellow, “When your grandparents were in the shtetl eating borscht, my father was playing violin for the Tzar.”  I just quaked and kept my mouth shut, knowing that, unlike some of my other clients, his checks also wouldn’t bounce.

I learned a lot about how peoples’ hidden fears manifest themselves that year.  It was “Ego Boot Camp” for a much later gig on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff where I scheduled experts to be interviewed by the Senators on topics dealing with war and worse. 

It didn't dawn on me until much later that Harry knew that stars like Belfonte, Bernstein, Judy Garland and the like would fill the house no matter what I did ... but his contract said there must be a press agent.  So he found the cheapest in town who wouldn't embarrass him.  And I never did.   ###