1 A GLASS EYE AND A BRITISH ACCENT

1909

He was fifteen years old, just five feet four inches tall and slight, with an owlish mien and an energetic manner. He had a glass eye and a British accent. And he needed a job.

Louis Abraham Warmwater was born in Whitechapel, London, on January 26, 1894, the second child and first son of seven children. When his family emigrated to New York from London in 1909, he was unhappy about leaving the English city he loved. “It made me the most desperately lonely kid in the world,” recalled Lou Walters, whose family, like many others, simplified their surname when they arrived on America’s shores. “I wanted to go back.” He was forced to make other adjustments, too. Before they left, he was playing when he fell on a broken milk bottle and a shard of glass pierced his right eye. He would wear a blue glass eye for the rest of his life.

After they arrived in New York, he didn’t have the option of enrolling in school, though he would be an avid reader his entire life and was said to be a talented writer. As a schoolboy in London, he received a silver medal for an essay he had written; in some versions of the story, the award came from King Edward VII. But his family needed his paycheck, so he searched for work. That discouraging enterprise stretched for seven months, through the entire first winter in his new city. Each morning, he would walk nearly three miles to Times Square from their tenement on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side, he wrote in an unpublished memoir, “It’s a Long Walk.” There, a building at the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street posted want ads on its windows. He would race to the address of a listing that sounded promising only to find twenty or thirty boys lined up ahead of him; soon there would be another twenty or thirty lined up behind him.

When the bosses announced the position had been filled, he would rush to the site of the next prospective job, where there would be another forty boys ahead of him. “It was hopeless,” he said. After months of fruitless effort, he spied this notice: “Office boy wanted. Independent Booking Offices. 1440 Broadway. Apply after 2:00 p.m.”

He didn’t know what a booking office did; he only cared that it was a job. At noon, he wandered over to the Knickerbocker Theatre building at the corner of Broadway and 38th Street and introduced himself to the desk clerk, who to his astonishment ushered him in to see the man in charge, Mr. Stermdorf. Had he worked anywhere before? No. Could he type? No. Hadn’t he read that applicants weren’t supposed to show up for another two hours?

Yes, he replied, but by then there would be an endless line.

Stermdorf sent him away with instructions to come back at two. When the teenager showed up five minutes early, the reception room was jammed and his heart fell. “Sorry, the job’s been filled,” the clerk told him. He was halfway down the stairs when he realized it wasn’t yet 2 p.m.; how could the job be filled? As it turned out, the people who crowded the reception room were entertainers looking for work, and the office boy position was still open.

“Oh, you’re Lou Walters, the one who came early,” the clerk said. “Come in.”

He was hired. Lou suggested it was because Stermdorf was British and appreciated his accent. His daughter would speculate it was because of the gumption he had demonstrated—and that she inherited—by showing up early that day. Whatever the reason, he had succeeded in landing a job, at a weekly salary variously reported at $4 or $6. It would launch him on his life’s course. It would set a path as well for the career his daughter would pursue decades later, one also wrapped in the public’s fascination with celebrities and their stories. Quite by accident, the Walters family had found its calling.

When one of the agency’s owners, Johnny Quigley, left soon afterward to open a branch office in Boston, Lou Walters went with him. Walters’s parents and younger siblings soon moved to Boston, too, although they wouldn’t stay long before settling in New Jersey. By the time he was seventeen, not old enough to drink or to vote, Lou had worked his way up to the job of booker. The field was dominated by the competing United Booking Office, which had signed many of the biggest acts to exclusive, long-term contracts. That meant the Independent Booking Agency, a shoestring operation, had to scramble to line up the remaining singers, dancers, comedians, jugglers, magicians, musicians, and acrobats for smaller towns and vaudeville halls. Despite his youth, Walters turned out to be preternaturally skilled at spotting prospects, then persuading theater owners across New England and in Canada to hire them.

By the time he was twenty years old, he boasted, he was booking four hundred acts and earning a magnificent $30 each week. He was a small man and not particularly handsome. His wire-rimmed glasses made him look more like a bespectacled professor than a master of vaudeville. But he had a big personality and a zest for the business. He had street smarts and a sharply honed instinct for what the public would want to see.

He also was more than willing to take a gamble—for better and worse, the hallmark of the life that followed. He asked Quigley for a $20-a-week raise. “He put an extra five in my envelope,” Lou recalled. “I returned it, and quit.” He founded the Lou Walters Booking Agency instead, renting a second-floor office above Macy’s drugstore, at the corner of Tremont and Stuart Streets. He had $75 in his pocket, just enough to pay the rent and turn on the lights.

By now the young man was a familiar figure in show business circles up and down the Northeast. His new agency represented rising stars and falling ones, everyone from accordionists to zitherists. He signed up Fred Allen when he was billing himself as Fred James, “the world’s worst juggler.” Allen would become a top comedian and pal of Jack Benny. Walters also discovered Jack Haley, then a comic, who would gain fame as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. He represented a young Boston songwriter and pianist named Jimmy McHugh, who would write classic songs that would be recorded by Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, and Judy Garland.

It was the Roaring Twenties, and vaudeville was at its peak. The speakeasies operating in Boston—illegal during Prohibition, and typically run by racketeers and mobsters—were hungry to book entertainers. Lou was making more money than he had ever imagined, and he wasn’t shy about spending it. “He wasn’t one to say, ‘Let’s hold back and put it in the bank,’ ” said Ed Risman, who would be his business associate for a quarter-century. “If he had the money he spent it, or he gambled it.” Lou’s personal bookie set up permanent quarters in the small waiting room outside his office. By some estimates, Walters was earning $65,000 to $75,000 a year. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $2 million in 2023 dollars.

In a way, Lou Walters was a “million-dollar baby” a generation before his daughter would famously gain that sobriquet.