Hands, Hat & Cane

The tall girls, smiling and spangle-breasted, glided into darkness as the lights blacked out and the brasses blared an entrance for one of the oldest sets of trademarks in show business: a twirling opera stick, dancing hands, and a battered top hat. Only one thing was missing, and now came--the question everybody was waiting for, dreamily euphoric and hypnotically assured: "Is everybody happy?" Ted Lewis was making another swing around the country.

Last week he was playing Manhattan's Latin Quarter, right across Broadway from where Rector's used to be. It was at Rector's in 1917 that Ted made his first hit in the big time, and his family the Friedmans of Circleville, Ohio, finally learned what their wandering boy was up to. And it was outside Rector's one night that Ted acquired his famous topper in a crap game with a cabbie named Mississippi. It has been part of his act ever since.

For the next 40 weeks or so, Ted Lewis will be asking if everybody is happy in the cities which welcome him back year after year: Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Nev., Los Angeles, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth and a dozen places in between. He will travel with his own troupe of eleven musicians, a magician, and assorted singers and dancers, and will net himself around $8,000 a week. But everywhere he goes, 61-year-old Ted Lewis will be able to warm up his listeners with reminiscences of the barnstorming days before the going was so good--being booked into store-front vaudeville at $22.50 a week and changing his name every time he got fired, playing his clarinet in bawdyhouses when he was stranded, and periodically turning up in Circleville for another few crestfallen months sweeping out the family store.

Ted Lewis might have reached the top as a straight musician without his top hat, cane and patter. His free-riding clarinet was imitated by the young Benny Goodman, and his band gave asylum to such latter-day jazz greats as Muggsy Spanier, Jimmy Dorsey and George Brunis. His recording of St. Louis Blues sent hepcats of the '20s as far out of this world as people got in those days. But Ted was too much of a showman to stick to music. Today it is not the Lewis clarinet that people come for, but the sleepy smile and the twirling cane as he struts and soft-shoes around the dance floor, looking like a cross between the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse and talking out (he is no singer) such oldies as Me and My Shadow and When My Baby Smiles at Me.

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