by dan pine
staff writer
Toots Shor must have been a special guy. On any given night, Yankee sluggers, Mafia chieftains and U.S. presidents might drop in at his Manhattan saloon for a little two-fisted drinking.
Shor was a New York icon for decades, mingling nightly with the famous and the infamous. His best friends were cats like Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and mobster Frank Costello, all of whom gathered at Toots Shor’s bar to give their livers a nightly whacking.
A rat packer before there was a rat pack, Shor is now the subject of a documentary, “Toots Shor: Bigger Than Life.” The film will screen Wednesday, Feb. 28 as part of the 12th annual Contra Costa International Jewish Film Festival, which is co-sponsored by the Jewish Community Federation of the Greater East Bay and the Contra Costa Jewish Community Center.
Filmmaker Kristi Jacobson, Shor’s granddaughter, created a loving yet unflinching tribute to Toots, showing his love of life, family and endless partying, as well as the poor business sense and cultural tone deafness that led to his demise.
For Jewish audiences, the film is a virtual primer on assimilation.
Bernard “Toots” Shor did not start out as the toasted toast of midtown. He was a scrappy Jewish kid from an Irish neighborhood of South Philadelphia, raised in an Orthodox home, but one with a twist: His mother urged him to fight back when other kids teased him for being Jewish.
Shor perfected his talent for fighting, becoming a bear-sized bouncer at New York speakeasies during Prohibition. He was “the only Jew kid working for the Irish mob.” He married a Ziegfeld girl (Catholic), and by 1940 he had opened his first restaurant.
Competing with clubs like El Morocco and Minsky’s, Shor grossed nearly a million in his first year. From filmed interviews with regulars like Pete Hamill and Frank Gifford, we learn Toots served “the most generous drinks, good food and nobody ever got sick … he had the greatest floor show in New York and it didn’t cost him a nickel.”
While Toots’ New York City was the classy post-war world capital, Toots himself was of another, simpler era, when there was no such thing as alcoholism and women did not go out unescorted. The fact that he always referred to himself as a saloonkeeper reveals he still had one foot in the horse-and-buggy era.
Shor says in an interview with Mike Wallace (easily 10 years before “60 Minutes” premiered) that his friends were enormously important to him. He did have an old-fashioned concept of friendship, and it usually involved a bottle of scotch. But he was a good friend and mentor, as Frank Gifford’s testimony proves. When Gifford contemplated retirement after a nasty football injury, Toots persuaded the Hall of Famer get back in the game.
There is little one could point to in Shor’s life that indicates he was Jewish. And that was probably the point, in his mind. He was the “Jew kid,” while Frank Sinatra was the “dago.” The labels meant nothing. In Shor’s bar, everyone was equally American, no matter what he did, where he came from, how much he earned or whom he killed.
He was the ultimate assimilated Jew, the ultimate Jewish American success story, where the immigrant past is shed in exchange for a shot glass, a sharp tuxedo and a pinky ring. Sadly, the times passed him by. Between IRS hounding and his own unwillingness to evolve, Shor died broke.
But not alone.
His friends stuck by him to the end. How else to explain macho Gifford tearfully recalling the last time he saw his buddy dying in the hospital?
Jacobson was blessed to work with classic period footage of Toots, including excerpts from an Edward R. Murrow interview, newsreel footage, and even a kitschy episode of “This is Your Life,” with Toots on the hot seat. She skillfully weaves stock shots spanning the gangland era to the anti-war ’60s to capture her grandfather’s heyday. This is solid documentary filmmaking, heightened by the fact that Jacobson had a personal stake in the story.
Toots Shor did not create anything of lasting value. He lived for the moment, and his moment has come and gone. But he exemplified a lust for life that seems timeless. Though he likely never read Psalm 90 in the Jewish Bible, he learned well the lesson to “number our days.”
“Toots Shor: Bigger Than Life” screens at the 12th annual Contra Costa International Jewish Film Festival, 10 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 28, at Contra Costa Jewish Community Center, 2071 Tice Valley Blvd., Walnut Creek. Tickets: $5. Information: (510) 839-2900 ext. 256, or online at www.jfed.org/filmfest07
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California