A tale of a legendary N.Y. saloon
Toots Shor's was the place for celebrities of all stripes to gather from 1940 into the '60s.
HOLLYWOOD - Early in
Toots
, the new documentary about the legendary New York saloon keeper Toots Shor, we get to see Frank Sinatra recalling the night Toots asked him to come to dinner at his joint with some of Toots' pals. The other pals? Bing Crosby, Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth.
As the four sultans of mid-century America made their way through the restaurant to a private table, the whole saloon spontaneously erupted with applause. If you were a celebrity in New York from 1940 through the early 1960s, the place to be was Toots Shor's, where you'd find sports icons, journalists, actors, mobsters or politicians, all lifting a glass in the same smoke-filled room.
Today's celebrity clubs and eateries are niche joints - the film crowd inhabits one spot, the musicians go somewhere else, the journalists (the ones who still have a job) have a different hangout. But Toots Shor's was a watering hole where everyone rubbed elbows. You'd see Joe DiMaggio at one table, Jackie Gleason at another, the likes of Frank Gifford or Mickey Mantle or Walter Cronkite across the room.
On one night, Toots (he was always Toots) could be seen having a drink with Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States, then heading across the room to hang out with mob boss Frank Costello. As the writer Pete Hamill says in the film: "Toots was a part of the imagination of people who had never even walked in there. They knew it existed the way they knew the Statue of Liberty existed."
Made by Kristi Jacobson, Toots' granddaughter, the documentary captures a colorful period in American culture, a booze-fueled age where men cheerfully insulted each other, bet on the ponies, and started drinking at lunch and often didn't stop till the sun came up.
Toots led by example. In the film, Jacobson's mother tells the story of the time he breezed into church one morning, determined to be there for his daughter's confirmation (Toots was Jewish, but his wife, a former showgirl affectionately known as Baby, brought the kids up Catholic). He had been out on the town all night, so he brought along his drinking buddy - John Wayne.
Toots wasn't much of a businessman, blowing most of the dough he ever made, but if he ever had problems with creditors, he'd turn to his pal, Frank Costello, who'd manage to set things right. One of the more interesting revelations in the movie is that when he needed ready cash to open a second restaurant in 1960, he went to Jimmy Hoffa, who lent him $7 million from the Teamsters union's pension fund.
A giant of a man, he was famously gruff - he used to boast of receiving a letter from an out-of-towner who'd enjoyed the food, but advised that if he wanted to be successful, "you'd better get rid of that fat slob of a headwaiter who spent most of his time insulting patrons."