According to Durante family lore, backed by childhood photos, Jimmy was an ugly kid, a runt with tiny pig eyes and a huge honker, from the day in 1893 when the midwife swaddled him on the kitchen table in their apartment at 90 Catherine Street on the Lower East Side. Where that house stood is now the site of the Alfred E. Smith Recreation Center. Like his childhood hero Smith, Jimmy Durante never lost his des-dem-youse accent, and never concealed the fact that he only made it through the seventh grade. In fact, he incorporated all that, and of course his giant schnozzola, into his endearing schtick.

His mother Rose had come from Salerno as a mail order bride. His father Bartolomeo, an outgoing eccentric who sported the sort of giant mustache that was stylish in the era, had earned his passage to America in the 1880s by helping to construct the Third Avenue El when he arrived. He then opened a tiny barbershop he ran until he was seventy-five, 86ing any customer who complained about the Caruso and classical records he constantly played on his beloved Victrola. On Saturdays Jimmy’s chore was to lather the gents before his dad shaved them. After he retired Bartolomeo still carried his scissors and clippers in a satchel, offering a free haircut to any guy who looked shaggy to him. Johnny Weissmuller remembered running into Bartolomeo one time and having to fend off the clippers. He explained to the old man that he’d let his hair grow in preparation for starring as Tarzan. Bartolomeo still insisted he looked like a bum. As Jimmy became famous his dad did too. Writing about Jimmy in her column, Hedda Hopper tagged Bartolomeo “Bizarre Bart.” He had it printed on cards, and when Mayor La Guardia declared May 8 1939 Schnozzola Day, Jimmy’s dad rode in the parade with him, handing out the card.

At school Jimmy took daily abuse for his schnozzola. He spent as little time there as possible and dropped out as soon as he could. It was a time when fewer than ten percent of kids in the city completed all eight grades of elementary school. Relatives gave the Durantes a piano, and Bartolomeo paid fifty cents a lesson for Jimmy to learn it, dreaming that his son would someday become a famous concert pianist. He was bitterly disappointed when Jimmy turned to ragtime instead, and for years refused to listen to him play. “Only boozers play that way!” Jimmy later remembered him yelling.

By seventeen he was playing as Ragtime Jimmy in rough saloons full of drunks, gangsters and hookers, like the Chatham on Doyers Street and the hoodlum hangout Maxine’s in Brooklyn, padlocked by the cops in 1915 for being the site of four murders in one week. In Coney Island during the summers he played all night, seven nights a week, at a dive called Diamond Tony’s, at the slightly more upscale Carey Walsh’s, and other joints. Tony was called Diamond because he wore a lot of fake ones. According to Durante, a gunman once held up the joint; when Tony offered to give him his rings, the gunman sneered he could keep them, his wife had better fakes at home. Durante met and became friends with Eddie Cantor at Walsh’s.

He graduated from there to a Harlem nightclub called the Alamo. Al Capone and some of his boys came in one night while he was playing. The boys heckled Durante about his nose, then Capone gave him a ride home and tipped him a hundred dollars, more than his weekly salary. It was at the Alamo that a vaudevillian, Jack Duffy, stuck him with his permanent nickname Schnozzola. He sold a few songs on Tin Pan Alley and worked in more clubs, like the dismally ill-named Pizzazz in Hells’ Kitchen, the midtown Nightingale, and the Paradiso in Italian Harlem, where, biographer Jhan Robbins informs us, “he was a fill-in for the regular pianist who was serving a sixty-day prison sentence for beating up a customer.”

In 1923 he and a couple of partners, the dancers Lou Clayton and Eddie Jackson, performed as a trio, the Three Sawdust Bums, at their own speakeasy on West Fifty-Eighth Street, called Club Durant because the sign painter forgot the e. When he offered to add it for another hundred bucks they said forget it. Later in the decade they opened another club called the Parody. They sang, danced, told jokes, did routines, worked the crowd every way they could. They hired a bad French singer named Fifi just so they could make fun of her. They kidded the stuffed shirts in the audience. Performers in the cabarets and clubs of the 1910s and 1920s had to learn how to step down off the stage and do a floor show, a relatively new concept imported from Paris, pioneering a new, more intimate experience with the audience. Sophie Tucker, shimmying up to the tables and cracking wise with the men, was an expert at it. Durante did it in his own manic way, bouncing all over the room, dancing with the wives, cracking a million awful jokes and then banging out a tune on the “pianer.”

In 1927, when Fanny Brice took ill, the Bums got a shot at biggest-time vaudeville: the Palace in Times Square, the flagship of vaudeville theaters. They were a huge hit, breaking attendance records. Two years later Flo Ziegfeld hired them for the Follies, another step up, and in 1930 they went to Hollywood to appear in their first film, Roadhouse Nights. The trio broke up when Durante signed with MGM (part of the entertainment empire created by another Lower East Sider made good, Marcus Loew).

In the 1934 film Palooka, based on the Joe Palooka comic strip, Jimmy introduced a song he co-wrote with vaudevillian Ben Ryan, the novelty fluff “Inka Dinka Doo.” It was a big hit and his theme song for the rest of his life. Palooka was probably his best picture. Although he would go on to be in more than thirty others, he and Hollywood were never a tight fit. Like other performers who worked their way up from the gin joints and vaudeville, he could be too loud and hyperactive for the screen. As Banjo in The Man Who Came to Dinner he seems to burst in from another movie altogether from the one Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan think they’re making. He caroms around the set, mugs and hams like he’s back in the Club Durant, leaving the rest of the cast looking exhausted. In George Pal’s The Great Rupert he co-stars with a stop-motion squirrel in a kilt, which actually makes more sense than it might sound.

Jimmy did better as a radio and tv personality, unscripted or barely scripted, where he calmed down a little and endeared himself to audiences with his dese-dem-dose and mangled malapropisms. He had a million of the latter. He once told a Metropolitan Opera diva that he loved classical music like “the Midnight Sinatra.” Speaking of “Sweater Girl” Lana Turner, he mused, “Take away her sweater and what have you got?”

It was at the end of his radio show that he started using his famously wistful send-off, “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.” Figuring out who Mrs. Calabash was became a nationwide obsession. He was hounded about it till the day he died in 1980 and never gave up the secret. The most widely accepted theory was that it was a pet name for his wife, who died in 1943, the year he debuted on radio. But biographer Robbins writes in his 1991 Inka Dinka Doo that in fact it was just a gag Durante and a producer cooked up offhandedly, never expecting it to become such a big deal.

by John Strausbaugh