Hal liked the idea. I sat by his desk while he made the call, and two foot-loose actresses caught the next available plane from Philadelphia to New York.
There is a New York night club with a deserved reputation for high-class entertainment called the Copacabana, formerly conducted by Jack Entratter, who became the impresario of the Las Vegas Sands, and Monte Proser, who went on to operate Broadway’s Lanai. For some years the Copa has enjoyed the services of Jules Podell, who has a gravel voice and a sharp temper.
Not long after the Martin and Lewis breakup Jerry was visiting New York to do a television show, while Sinatra was appearing at the Copa, drawing such crowds that they waited outside in the winter cold for hours in lines that stretched halfway around the block.
Jerry had played the Copa with Dean some three years earlier and quarreled briefly with Podell in the course of the engagement. One day Frank came down with an occupational sore throat, and Jerry agreed to substitute at the Copa for him, though he had no formal act and hadn’t played a night-club date alone since his parting from Dean. He appeared that night ad-libbing like crazy, but that was the last time the Copa ever saw him.
Jerry had a press agent who knew the Copa and Podell well. In a previous job, when he’d had his own public-relations business, the agent represented the place as one of his clients. The agent was in the bar one night watching Podell, in his overcoat, ushering in the customers to the restaurant and floor show downstairs. “You’re doing fantastic business with Sinatra,” the agent said admiringly.
“I need you to tell me?” snapped Podell. “Get the hell out of here.”
The agent snapped right back. The two fell into a shouting match, which ended with the agent spitting at Podell and walking out the front door, back to the Hampshire House suite where Jerry was staying. There was no satisfying Jerry until he’d heard the full account of the set-to. By now it was after midnight, but Jerry picked up the telephone to get two vice presidents of MCA out of bed, with a summons to meet him at ten o’clock the following morning at the Brooklyn studios where he was rehearsing his television show.
The pair of them showed up on the dot. They knew Jerry had a contract for a future appearance at the Copa. “I want you,” he ordered, “to write Mr. Podell a letter saying I will never appear, never set foot there from now on. You can say I don’t give a damn what pressure they try to put on me. I told Podell years ago if he ever talked nasty to any one of my people or laid a hand on one of them, he’d see the last of me.”
Over the next few days Jerry had some interesting telephone calls from all kinds of people promising to straighten things out with Podell. Jerry had a stock answer: “Not if I live to be a thousand will I talk to Podell. Nobody should look to get lucky with me. I’m not going into that place—ever.”
He made that decision stick. One side of Jerry knocks himself out to have people like him. The other side includes a mind like a steel trap; when he says no, he means not bloody likely. He won’t run away from a fight, but he shies away from people who frighten him intellectually because they’re better educated than he is. He’s the son of show-business parents who left school in the tenth grade after swatting a teacher for saying: “All Jews are stupid.”