Eddie Cantor

Contributor: Kenneth Pooley

Eddie Cantor’s light-hearted musical films – often packed with Hollywood beauties – all of which could be enjoyed in the thirties for the price of a sixpenny cinema ticket, helped to lift some of the gloom during those years of depression. I still have the memory of his newsreel interview when he visited Britain in the thirties, a man of average height dwarfed by his wife and daughters.

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Isidore Itzkowitz was born in New York in 1892. He was orphaned at the age of three and raised by his grandmother on the mean streets of the Lower East Side. He took on the name, Eddie Cantor, when he was 11 and was already an entertainer by then, soon winning local talent contests. From there, it wasn’t far to vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies. Broadway followed, as did radio and television and books and, of course, movies where he became a world star.

The much-loved Eddie Cantor, Banjo Eyes, the Apostle of Pep, died in 1964 – a renaissance man to the very end.

It wasn’t easy to select just ten from his list of recordings; some of these came from his films, others from his long vaudeville career.

Makin’ Whoopee and My Baby Just Cares For Me (both written by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn) were first sung by Eddie Cantor in the 1928 musical Whoopee!. Yes Sir, That’s My Baby, again by Donaldson & Khan, is from 1925 and was a huge record for Cantor five years later. Keep Young And Beautiful was written by Al Dubin and Harry Warren and was performed by Eddie Cantor in the film Roman Scandals (1933).

The Eddie Cantor Appreciation Society

Eddie Cantor biography (iTunes)

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