TOOTS SHOR

In 40s and 50s Manhattan, Toots Shor's West 51st Street gin mill drew everyone from Ernest Hemingway to Joe DiMaggio

RICHARD MERKIN

Flashback

Long ago Toots Shor and the fabled gin mill that bore his name became members of the Apocrypha Club, where, eternally, Yogi Berra swaps malapropisms with Casey Stengel, Oscar Wilde verbally fences with Jimmy Whistler, and Dorothy Parker talks with, well, anyone at all. The restaurant opened in April 1940 at 51 West 51st Street. (It was to have two more bona fide incarnations and, in the end, three locations that merely traded on Shor's name.) It opened on a shoestring, but Shor was partial to shoestrings. As he was about to go in the front door he took the 40 cents he had to his name and threw it down Sixth Avenue. He later explained, "I wanted to go in flat-pocket and start from scratch."

In the Manhattan of the 40s and 50s, Toots Shor's was the celebrity joint of choice, counting among its august clientele Ernest Hemingway, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Harry Truman, Bob Hope, Jimmy Cannon, Eddy Duchin, Georgie Jessel, former mayor Jimmy Walker, George Raft, Joe DiMaggio, J. Edgar Hoover, Mark Hellinger, Red Smith, Earl Wilson, and Sir Alexander Fleming. (Women were not encouraged—on general principles, one presumes.)

If the decor was modest in appearance, the saloonkeeper wasn't. Six feet two and beefy, Shor was, at once, outrageously generous and kind and capable of a colossal arrogance. One night Charlie Chaplin was waiting on line, a situation that would have called for an immediate seating at any other hot spot in New York. "It'll be 20 minutes, Charlie," Toots said. "Be funny for the people." On another occasion Louis B. Mayer tired of the wait. In a

loud voice he said to his companion, "This is a nice room here. I hope the food is good." Toots turned and, with a sneer, said, "I've seen some of ya pitchas."

Six years before Toots died in 1977, one of the original locations was padlocked for unpaid income taxes. Speculation upon the cause of the demise was rampant. But Toots Shor's closed because the Tootsian sentiment "Any bum who can't get drunk by midnight ain't tryin'" was no longer a popular sentiment. Toots Shor's folded finally because hangovers were no longer fashionable. Shor's time was a simpler one, a time of chorus girls and baggy flannel baseball uniforms and bespoke Peal's shoes, when, as Fitzgerald put it, "we still believed in summer hotels and the philosophies of popular songs."