Was Jimmy Durante a Vaudville Comedian, Jazz Band Leader, Recording Artist, Theatre, Radio, Movie, or TV  Star ??  Actually ALL.  One of the first Jazz recording artists, did 40 films, was one of the first stars of television, and became one of the most popular entertainers in America, a giant in his day!

Durante was a lovable comedian whose laughs came at his own expense rather than by belittling others.  Though he died nearly 25 ago, children today still know him as the narrator of Frosty the Snowman (1969).

Ragtime Jimmy
New York Daily News
Big Town Song Book
By Mara Bovsun
September 7, 2004

Mamma Rosa wanted to give her youngest son a taste of the finer things.

Young James Francis had a tough life on the lower East Side in the early 1900s. The poor kid couldn't step outside without someone's braying those cruel words that sent him fleeing home in tears:

"Lookit that big-nosed kid."

There was no way around it. With a huge proboscis and squinty little eyes, Jimmy Durante was one ugly little boy. Neighbors simply called him "Naso," Italian for "The Nose."

Mamma Rosa decided that at least he should make beautiful music with the piano.

And so the Durantes — Rosa and her husband, Bartolomeo the barber — hired Professori Fiori, a diminutive Italian with a big black mustache and a reputation for pounding classics like "Poet and Peasant" and "La Paloma" into his reluctant pupils.

No one was more reluctant than Naso. Piano was swell, but that classical junk was for sissies.

Even after Bartolomeo sprang for a piano, which had to be hoisted to the fourth floor and hauled into the Durante apartment through a window, young Jimmy continued to turn his large nose up at the maestro, often skipping lessons to gamble away Professori's dollar fee.

He learned to play, all right, but it was not what Mamma had in mind. Instead of the uplifting, lilting classics, Jimmy was interested only in ragtime. Professor Fiori's lessons not only failed to show Mamma's angel the finer things, they gave him a ticket to damnation — to Sodom by the Sea, Coney Island.

At 17, Jimmy started tickling the ivories at Diamond Tony's on Surf Ave., where booze was baptized, the women were unholy and the rooms upstairs were never used for praying.

>From there he descended even deeper, into the sleazy lower East Side saloons, playing for gangsters, whores and opium fiends. The Durante clan was mortified. Jimmy's thug pals appreciated him, though. "You're the only real beauty we got in our lives," one sniffled. "The swell tunes an' everything.

"Then, in 1917, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band came to New York from New Orleans.

This was an all-white group, playing the music that had filtered through the streets of Storyville, the steamy red light district that had gone dark when the Navy closed the brothels. Durante was impressed.

And so he pulled together musicians for a group of his own, the Durante Original Jazz and Novelty Band, subsequently the Original New Orleans Jazz Band. No longer did anyone call him Naso. Now he was Ragtime Jimmy.

It mattered little that the Original New Orleans Jazz Band hailed from a beer joint in the basement of a burlesque house in Harlem. The band was a great success, and the arrival of Prohibition soon brought new opportunities in the burgeoning speakeasies.

Durante wanted to get into that act — but he demanded a little refinement.

"Don't let's get like them sneakin' jernts with no numbers on the doors, and where they gyp all the guys," he told his partners, insisting that they stretch their slim funds to buy an electric sign.

"The Club Durant," the marquee glowed. The final E was dropped, one story goes, because Ragtime Jimmy and his partners ran out of signage money at the T.

Black velvet covered the walls, there was a tiny dance floor, the cuisine was Chinese and the joint was always jumping. "This is the haunt of flaming youth, set to music," one guidebook noted.

Durante and two of his partners, Eddie Jackson and Lou Clayton, provided the entertainment, often with loud music and mayhem created by Durante, who started churning out nonsense songs like "I'm Jimmy, That Well-Dressed Man" and "Skeet, Skat," which he would belt out whenever the mood struck him.

"The Three Sawdust Bums," Variety columnist Sime Silverman dubbed Durante, Jackson and Clayton, and shortly the Club Durant was the hottest spot in town. One night, two men appeared at the door and announced themselves to be pals of Ragtime Jimmy's cop brother Al. Jimmy welcomed them in and bought them drinks. One took a bottle from his pocket and poured the drink into it.

"You are maybe chemists?" Durante asked.

"Yeah," the man replied. "For the Prohibition Department."

And so it came to pass that Jimmy Durante's own little den of iniquity was padlocked for good and he was out in the gutter, where his family always had feared he would end up.

All he had were his partners, Clayton and Jackson, and his music, and comic patter based on his unique interpretation of the English language. And, of course, his nose.

He had a new nickname now — Schnozzola.

It was all he needed.

Mamma Rosa did not live long enough to see her ugly duckling turn into a swan of sorts, the man with the world's most celebrated beak. She died in 1921, while her boy was still singing for gangsters.

She would never know that he would go on to hobnob with the glamour kings and queens of Hollywood, become a movie star, a famous TV personality. And it was all because of Professori Fiori's piano lessons.

Mamma might have taken some comfort knowing that at one point in his long career, little Naso did finally pen a "symphony," as he forever insisted upon calling it. "A masterpiece," he added.

"Inka Dinka Doo," that was called.

New York Daily News - Big Town
http://www.nydailynews.com/city_life/big_town/index.html

Jimmy Durante
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002051/

Jimmy Durante
http://www.redhotjazz.com/jdurante.html

Jimmy Durante
http://www.skypoint.com/members/schutz19/durante.htm