The one and only: maybe he died 20 years ago, but Durante and his `Ink a dinkadoo' still charm TV watchers - Television - Jimmy Durante remembered

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 8, 2002 by Raymond A. Schroth

What's dat? You wanna know what's the greatest moment of my life? I'll tell ya what's the greatest moment of my life! Was it the moment I was six inches away from John Paul II in New Orleans? No! Was it when, as a little boy, I saw Gene Autry in Macy's? No! Here it is.

There I was standing on the steps of the Fordham gym late at night in the early 1950s. Inside the band was playing for the junior prom.

Then this car pulls up and, like all the downs pouring out of a Volkswagen in the circus, out pops this little guy, 5-foot-7, and his entourage. He sweeps up the steps and into the bright lights of the show.

It was the one and only Jimmy Durante. Live and in person!

Somehow the student running the prom had an in with the Copacabana, where Durante was doing his stint, and between acts Durante had agreed to drive up and take Fordham by storm.

They swarmed across the dance floor and onto the stage like cowboys taking over a Dodge City bar.

Jimmy sits down and pounds out some notes on the piano. "What's this?" he exclaims in his gravelly Brooklyn accent. "No apostrophes!" So he tears the top off the piano and throws it into the orchestra, where his personal drummer, Jules Buffano, catches it before it kills anyone. Then he takes all the sheet music and throws it into the air. And starts to play:

   Once upon a time
   they sang the vodee-o do.
   But that was long ago.
   Then they started in
   to boop boop adoop.
   They got fired of that, you know.

   But the tune for you and me
   is that swingin' symphony --
   Ink a dink a dink a dinkadink a
   dinkadoo ...

Then they were gone as quickly as they had come. Down the steps, into the car, back to the Copa.

According to the obituary in The New York Times for Jan. 30, 1980, by their star reporter Murray Shumach, Jimmy Durante died the day before. His parish church had both a rosary service and a Mass before he was buried in Holy Cross cemetery. The rosary made sense. I had heard him on Father Peyton's radio "Family Hour" -- "The family that prays together stays together" -- where Peyton gathered Hollywood stars like Robert Mitchum and Jimmy to recite the rosary over the air: "Hail Mary fulla greats, da Lord is wit'dee." Except the Times was wrong about Jimmy dying in 1980. He keeps showing up on TV.

First, there's that commercial for a very expensive car where his hoarse, grandfatherly voice, from a series of recordings he made in his late '70s when he had lost the physical energy for tearing up pianos on TV, somehow sooths you into buying the car. Whenever the soundtrack of "Sleepless in Seattle" is played, there is Jimmy's song "Make Someone Happy" setting the mood.

And when National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" was finally ready to say goodbye to 2001, they could pick nothing better than Jimmy's rendition of "A kiss is just a kiss ... a sigh is just a sigh ... as time goes by."

Raised on the old "you-gotta-start-off-each-day-with-a-song" that Durante sang a lot, I never cottoned to the sentimental balladeer. But here I could see the attraction: his articulation, with every word as clear as if he was looking you right in the face as he played and you and he were the only ones in the room. You believed him.

We probably didn't know that his singing of "September Song" -- "For it's a long long while, from May to December ..." -- mirrored his second marriage, in 1960, to the almost 30 years younger Marjorie Little, 16 years after the death of his first wife, who, some suggested, was "Mrs. Calabash." Though his adopted daughter CeCe said Mrs. Calabash represented all the lonely women in the world.

This very night, as I write, in a Turner Classic Movies documentary on William Randolph Hearst's mistress Marion Davies (who was pilloried as a ditzy bimbo in "Citizen Kane,") there was the young 40-ish Durante swooning in Marion Davies' embrace.

Most important, public TV stations across the nation have been playing a Durante special to boost their fundraising drives. "Pick up the phone and send us money," they say, "and we'll shut up and put Jimmy Durante back on."

"The Great Schnozzola' (Crew Neck Productions) is a little heavy on nose jokes and chores girls, but Jimmy's schtick with Donald O'Connor, Sinatra and Liberace transcends space and time. Above all, he comes across as what he really was, a genuinely good and lovable person.

Vaudeville dancer Lou Clayton said, "You Can warm your hands on this man."

Born Feb. 10 in 1893, Jimmy never got beyond seventh grade (where, according to The New York Times, he met his childhood sweetheart, "Mrs. Calabash"). His parents had hoped he'd be a concert pianist, but he went honky-tonk and played in New York bars, forming the team of Clayton, Eddie Jackson and Durante, which became a vaudeville sensation. A string of movies didn't let his talents show,

but his TV show of the 1950s, based on the intimate style and material of his night club and vaudeville acts, though meticulously rehearsed, recaptured the chaotic spontaneity that made him both hilarious and lovable.