BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Full Name: Israel Iskowitz
Description: Vocalist, Actor, USA
Known For: Known for songs that include – Makin Whoopee” – “Margie”
Music Styles: Easy Listening
Location: United States of America
Date Born: 31st January 1882
Location Born: New York City, New York, United States of America
Date Died: 10th October 1964
Location Died: New York City, New York, United States of America
Cause Of Death: Heart Attack
Memorial: He is buried in Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery.
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BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
Eddie Cantor
An American comedian, singer, actor, and songwriter. Familiar to Broadway, radio and early television audiences.
Eddie Cantor (circa September 21, 1892 – October 10, 1964), born Edward Israel Iskowitz, was an American “illustrated song” performer, comedian, dancer, singer, actor, and songwriter. Familiar to Broadway, radio, movie, and early television audiences, this “Apostle of Pep” was regarded almost as a family member by millions because his top-rated radio shows revealed intimate stories and amusing anecdotes about his wife Ida and five daughters. Some of his hits include “Makin’ Whoopee”, “Ida”, “Yes! We Have No Bananas”, “If You Knew Susie”, “Ma! He’s Makin’ Eyes at Me”, “Baby”, “Margie”, and “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” He also wrote a few songs, including “Merrily We Roll Along”, the Merrie Melodies Warner Bros. cartoon theme.
His eye-rolling song-and-dance routines eventually led to his nickname, “Banjo Eyes”. In 1933, artist Frederick J. Garner caricatured Cantor with large round eyes resembling the drum-like pot of a banjo. Cantor’s eyes became his trademark, often exaggerated in illustrations, and leading to his appearance on Broadway in the musical Banjo Eyes (1941).
His charity and humanitarian work was extensive, and he is credited with coining the phrase, and helping to develop the March of Dimes. He was awarded an honorary Academy Award in 1956 for distinguished service to the film industry.
Cantor was born in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Meta and Mechel Itzkowitz. The precise date of his birth is unknown. His mother died in childbirth one year after his birth, and his father died of pneumonia when Eddie was two, leaving him to be raised by his grandmother, Esther Kantrowitz.[6] As a child, he attended Surprise Lake Camp. A misunderstanding when his grandmother signed him into school gave him her last name of Kantrowitz (shortened by the clerk to “Kanter”). Esther died on January 29, 1917, two days before Cantor signed a long-term contract with Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., to appear in his Follies.
Above: The Cantors in 1952
Cantor had adopted the first name “Eddie” when he met his future wife Ida Tobias in 1913, because she felt that “Izzy” was not the right name for an actor. Cantor and Ida were married in 1914. They had five daughters, Marjorie, Natalie, Edna, Marilyn, and Janet, who provided comic fodder for Cantor’s longtime running gag, especially on radio, about his five unmarriageable daughters. Several radio historians, including Gerald Nachman (Raised on Radio), have said that this gag did not always sit well with the girls.
Cantor was the second president of the Screen Actors Guild, serving from 1933 to 1935. He invented the title “The March of Dimes” for the donation campaigns of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was organized to combat polio. It was a play on the The March of Time newsreels popular at the time. He began the first campaign on his radio show in January 1938, asking listeners to mail a dime to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. At that time, Roosevelt was the most notable American victim of polio. Other entertainers joined in the appeal via their own shows, and the White House mail room was deluged with 2,680,000 dimes—a large sum at the time.
Following the death of their daughter Marjorie at the age of 44, both Eddie and Ida’s health declined rapidly. Ida died in August 1962 of “cardiac insufficiency”, and Eddie died on October 10, 1964, in Beverly Hills, California, after suffering his second heart attack at age 72. He is interred in Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.
By his early teens, Cantor began winning talent contests at local theaters and started appearing on stage. One of his earliest paying jobs was doubling as a waiter and performer, singing for tips at Carey Walsh’s Coney Island saloon, where a young Jimmy Durante accompanied him on piano. He made his first public appearance in Vaudeville in 1907 at New York’s Clinton Music Hall. In 1912, he was the only performer over the age of 20 to appear in Gus Edwards’s Kid Kabaret, where he created his first blackface character, “Jefferson”. He later toured with Al Lee as the team “Cantor and Lee”. Critical praise from that show got the attention of Broadway’s top producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, who gave Cantor a spot in the Ziegfeld rooftop post-show, Midnight Frolic (1917).
Above: Cantor as host of The Colgate Comedy Hour, 1952.
Broadway
A year later, Cantor made his Broadway debut in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917. He continued in the Follies until 1927, a period considered the best years of the long-running revue. For several years, Cantor co-starred in an act with pioneer comedian Bert Williams, both appearing in blackface; Cantor played Williams’s fresh-talking son. Other co-stars with Cantor during his time in the Follies included Will Rogers, Marilyn Miller, Fanny Brice, and W.C. Fields. He moved on to stardom in book musicals, starting with Kid Boots (1923) and Whoopee! (1928). On tour with Banjo Eyes, he romanced the unknown Jacqueline Susann, who had a small part in the show, and went on to become the best-selling author of Valley of the Dolls.
Ziegfeld Follies of 1917 – revue – performer
Ziegfeld Follies of 1918 – revue – performer, co-composer and co-lyricist for “Broadway’s Not a Bad Place After All” with Harry Ruby
Ziegfeld Follies of 1919 – revue – performer, lyricist for “(Oh! She’s the) Last Rose of Summer”
Ziegfeld Follies of 1920 – revue – composer for “Green River”, composer and lyricist for “Every Blossom I See Reminds Me of You” and “I Found a Baby on My Door Step”
The Midnight Rounders of 1920 – revue – performer
Broadway Brevities of 1920 – revue – performer
Make It Snappy (1922) – revue – performer, co-bookwriter
Ziegfeld Follies of 1923 – revue – sketch writer
Kid Boots (1923) – musical comedy – actor in the role of “Kid Boots” (the Caddie Master)
Ziegfeld Follies of 1927 – revue – performer, co-bookwriter
Whoopee! (1928) – musical comedy – actor in the role of “Henry Williams”
Eddie Cantor at the Palace (1931) – solo performance
Banjo Eyes (1941) – musical comedy – actor in the role of “Erwin Trowbridge”
Nellie Bly (1946) – musical comedy – co-producer
Cantor appeared on radio as early as February 3, 1922, as indicated by this news item from Connecticut’s Bridgeport Telegram:
Local radio operators listened to one of the finest programs, yet produced over the radiophone last night. The program of entertainment which included some of the stars of Broadway musical comedy and vaudeville was broadcast from the Newark, N. J. station WDY and the PittsburCantor’s appearance with Rudy Vallee on Vallee’s The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour on February 5, 1931 led to a four-week tryout with NBC’s The Chase and Sanborn Hour. Replacing Maurice Chevalier, who was returning to Paris, Cantor joined Chase and Sanborn on September 13, 1931. This hour-long Sunday evening variety series teamed Cantor with announcer Jimmy Wallington and violinist Dave Rubinoff. The show established Cantor as a leading comedian, and his scriptwriter, David Freedman, as “the Captain of Comedy.” Freedman’s team included, among others, Samuel “Doc” Kurtzman, who also wrote for song-and-dance man, Al Jolson, and the comedian Jack Benny. Cantor soon became the world’s highest-paid radio star. His shows began with a crowd chanting “We want Can-tor! We want Can-tor!”, a phrase said to have originated in vaudeville, when the audience chanted to chase off an act on the bill before Cantor. Cantor’s theme song was his own lyric to the Leo Robin/Richard Whiting song, “One Hour with You”. His radio sidekicks included Bert Gordon, (comic Barney Gorodetsky, aka “The Mad Russian”) and Harry Parke (better known as “Parkyakarkus”). Cantor also discovered and helped guide the career of singer Dinah Shore, first featuring her on his radio show in 1940, as well as other performers, including Deanna Durbin, Bobby Breen in 1936 and Eddie Fisher in 1949.
Indicative of his effect on the mass audience, he agreed in November 1934 to introduce a new song by the songwriters J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie that other well-known artists had rejected as being “silly” and “childish”. The song, “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”, immediately had orders for 100,000 copies of sheet music the next day. It sold 400,000 copies by Christmas of that year.
His NBC radio show, Time to Smile, was broadcast from 1940 to 1946, followed by his Pabst Blue Ribbon Show from 1946 through 1949. He also served as emcee of The $64 Question during 1949–50, and hosted a weekly disc jockey program for Philip Morris during the 1952–53 season. In addition to film and radio, Cantor recorded for Hit of the Week Records, then again for Columbia, for Banner and Decca and various small labels.
His heavy political involvement began early in his career, including his participation in the strike to form Actors Equity in 1919, provoking the anger of father figure and producer, Florenz Ziegfeld. At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Cantor publicly denounced antisemitic radio personality Father Charles Coughlin and was dropped by his sponsor, Camel cigarettes. A year and a half later, his friend Jack Benny was able to get him back on the air.gh station KDKA, both of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. The Newark entertainment started at 7 o’clock: a children’s half-hour of music and fairy stories; 7:, Hawaiian airs and violin solo; 8:00, news of the day; and at 8:20, a radio party with nationally known comedians participating; 9:55, Arlington time signals and 10:01, a government weather report. G. E. Nothnagle, who conducts a radiophone station at his home 176 Waldemere Avenue said last night that he was delighted with the program, especially with the numbers sung by Eddie Cantor. The weather conditions are excellent for receiving, he continued, the tone and the quality of the messages was fine.
Above: Cantor with Bert Gordon, aka “the Mad Russian”.
Recordings
Cantor began making phonograph records in 1917, recording both comedy songs and routines and popular songs of the day, first for Victor, then for Aeoleon-Vocalion, Pathé, and Emerson. From 1921 through 1925, he had an exclusive contract with Columbia Records, returning to Victor for the remainder of the decade.
Cantor was one of the era’s most successful entertainers, but the 1929 stock market crash took away his multimillionaire status and left him deeply in debt. However, Cantor’s relentless attention to his own earnings to avoid the poverty he knew growing up caused him to use his writing talent, quickly building a new bank account with his highly popular, bestselling books of humor and cartoons about his experience, Caught Short! A Saga of Wailing Wall Street in 1929 “A.C.” (After Crash), and Yoo-Hoo, Prosperity!
Cantor was also a composer, with his most famous song seldom attributed to him. In 1935, along with Charles Tobias and Murray Mencher, Cantor wrote “Merrily We Roll Along”, which he recorded in the 1950s. It was adapted as the themesong for the Merrie Melodies series of animated cartoons, distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures between 1937 and 1964. Cantor himself was frequently caricatured in Warner cartoons of the period, (see Film and television: Animation).
Filmography
A Few Moments With Eddie Cantor, Star of “Kid Boots” (1923) (DeForest Phonofilm sound-on-film short film)
Kid Boots (1926)
Special Delivery (1927)
A Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic (1929) (short)
Glorifying the American Girl (1929)
That Party in Person (1928) (short)
Insurance (1930) (short)
Getting a Ticket (1930) (short)
Whoopee! (1930)
Palmy Days (1931)
Talking Screen Snapshots (1932) (short)
The Kid from Spain (1932)
Roman Scandals (1933)
The Hollywood Gad-About (1934) (short)
Kid Millions (1934)
Strike Me Pink (1936)
Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937)
The March of Time Volume IV, Issue 5 (1937) (short)
Forty Little Mothers (1940)
Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943)
Show Business (1944) (also producer)
Hollywood Canteen (1944)
Screen Snapshots: Radio Shows (1945) (short)
American Creed (1946) (short)
Meet Mr. Mischief (1947) (short) (appears on poster)
If You Knew Susie (1948)
Screen Snapshots: Hollywood’s Happy Homes (1949) (short)
The Story of Will Rogers (1952)
Screen Snapshots: Memorial to Al Jolson (1952) (short)
The Eddie Cantor Story (1953) (cameo)
Eddie Cantor died in 1964.
Cantor was awarded an honorary Academy Award the year of his death.
Films include.
Widow at the Races (1913)
A Few Moments With Eddie Cantor, Star of “Kid Boots” (1923)
Kid Boots (1926)
Special Delivery (1927)
A Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic (1929)
Glorifying the American Girl (1929)
That Party in Person (1928)
Insurance (1930) (
Getting a Ticket (1930)
Whoopee! (1930)
Palmy Days (1931)
Talking Screen Snapshots (1932)
The Kid from Spain (1932)
Roman Scandals (1933)
The Hollywood Gad-About (1934)
Kid Millions (1934)
Strike Me Pink (1936)
Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937)
The March of Time Volume IV, Issue 5 (1937)
Forty Little Mothers (1940)
Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943)
Show Business (1944)
Hollywood Canteen (1944)
Screen Snapshots: Radio Shows (1945)
American Creed (1946)
Meet Mr. Mischief (1947)
If You Knew Susie (1948)
Screen Snapshots: Hollywood’s Happy Homes (1949)
The Story of Will Rogers (1952)
Screen Snapshots: Memorial to Al Jolson (1952)
The Eddie Cantor Story (1953)
CONTACT DETAILS
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