THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE
MAY 17, 1973
Greta Levy, once known throughout the five boroughs as Greta the Great, an illusionist who put girlie club Va-Va-Voom Girls on the map, has died. She was 39 and had no children, only a ratty Pekingese whose name is not known.
Levy was the oldest daughter of Jewish refugees from Berlin. Her father, Max, booked passage for the family on a Dutch freighter when Greta was a baby, forfeiting family heirlooms and traveling only with the money her mother was able to sew into their clothes, something she had been doing, coin by coin, for the previous two years.
“My mother was blessed with a sixth sense,” Levy said on her one “Ed Sullivan Show” appearance in 1953. “And I can manipulate time itself.” She wiggled her fingers like a magician in a hypnosis horror movie, and the audience burst into laughter and applause. Levy insisted she was serious, that time as we understood it was “just an illusion, like sawing a lady in half,” which only made the audience laugh harder. The experience soured her to fame, and she turned down all future invitations, claiming television to be “the greatest illusion of all—the illusion of absolute truth and certainty.”
Greta Levy spent her childhood in a cramped Lower East Side apartment, with two younger sisters and her parents, sewing lingerie for Fifth Avenue department stores to help keep the family afloat. Her parents struggled to learn English, and as the eldest and the most skilled, Greta was often the only one in the family to find steady work. Her father, formerly a very rich man, descended into melancholy and accused everyone else in the family of being hysterical, eventually locking up his own wife in a sanitarium for the remainder of her short life.
To amuse her fellow seamstresses during their long hours, Levy would make her half-sewn girdles disappear, much to the chagrin of the boss, who would dock her pay until she could produce the garment, usually from the boss’s own ear. Levy insisted she wasn’t making the girdles disappear, just placing them in a different time, the way one might place a package in a mailbox for the postman to pick up.
“Ever misplace your keys or glasses?” she said on “Ed Sullivan.” “You probably found an ‘eddy’ in time. You didn’t lose them, they’re just in a different time. Sometimes that eddy is in the past, though. In which case, well, you need new glasses.”
“We girls knew she was destined for bigger things,” said a former coworker. “I was the one what introduced her to Va-Va-Voom. I says they’re advertising for a magician. ‘I’m not a magician,’ she said, I remember that. So I says, ‘Neither is Joe but somehow he magicked a baby in me.’ She gave me the oddest look, but next thing you know she’s Greta the Great. She didn’t even give me a ticket to say thank you. I had to pay full price.”
Levy auditioned for club owner Scarlett Schwartz, known for her snake-charming striptease. “The air around Greta crackled. There was just something about her. Something I hadn’t seen before,” Schwartz said. “I tried to nurture it, I tried to be a mentor to her. Let it out little by little, I told her. You have to hold your audience’s hand when you’re dealing with magic. They want to believe, but only if they’re confident it isn’t real. So you muck around, you pretend to fumble, you give them smoke and mirrors to put them at ease before you give them the real thing. They need an escape valve from magic. But Greta wasn’t having it. She didn’t want to hide behind a mirror.”
After several years in top hat, tails and not much else, making doves disappear and sawing dancing girls in half, Greta bribed the lighting girl to plunge the club into darkness and shine a single spotlight on her. The men in the audience hooted, expecting a “nudie show,” and instead were treated to Greta in pants and a suit coat, hair slicked back, nothing even remotely titillating. She leaned on a cane. The hoots turned to jeers.
It was a hot September night in 1955. Greta didn’t cower or apologize, which just made the jeering intensify. Not only was she not scantily clad, but she had pasted a full beard on her face, looking for all the world like she had grown it herself—a page right out of Schwartz’s book of tricks—which was a no-no at Va-Va-Voom.
“I treated my girls right, and I had only one rule. Do not upstage me,” Schwartz said. “It’s my club, and I am the star. As soon as I saw that fakakte beard, I should’ve whipped her offstage, but I loved Greta, what could I do?”
Schwartz recalled Levy’s voice booming with unusual power. “Gentlemen!” she cried. “What if you could manipulate time itself? What would you do with that power?”
The crowd booed, but Greta remained unruffled. She cupped a hand to her ear, mocking. “Did I hear someone say, ‘Kill Hitler’?” she said. “Why, imagine it: No war, no death, prosperity for all, even you lowlifes.”
Someone threw a rocks glass and she swung her cane—hitting it dead on and spraying glass shards over the crowd. The room fell silent.
“That’s when things got very strange,” Schwartz recalled. “[Expletive] Hitler, she said. Just used that word right here onstage.” Another Va-Va-Voom no-no. “She keeps going. She says ‘Tonight we’re going to save…’ God, I can never remember the name. That night is burned in my brain, but I can never remember the name of the girl she was ‘going back in time’ to save. I remember she had a book in one hand—the girl’s published diary. Supposedly. But I snatched that book from her later and it was just a blank journal. I could’ve beaten her with it, I swear.” According to Schwartz, in Levy’s other hand was a mundane tube of lotion.
“She says ‘Watch this hand—nothing out of the ordinary, just a tube of benzyl benzoate, a common treatment for scabies.’ I remember that name, clear as a bell,” Schwartz said. “Then she says, ‘I’m going to make it disappear…and reappear in the women’s bunkhouse at Auschwitz on the date Oct. 1, 1944.’ I still can’t figure out what the point of the whole thing was. I can only assume some kind of revenge on me for holding her back.”
Some in the audience reported Greta Levy singing an operatic high C into the heavens, some said she clucked like a chicken, others said she spoke in tongues. Schwartz swears to this day she whispered the nursery rhyme “Little Miss Muffet.”
Nothing happened.
That is, until the entire audience asked for a refund.
Levy was rushed offstage to avert an angry mob. “Sure, the tube was gone, but who cared about missing lotion? It was backstage, it was in her pocket, what was the point again? That stunt nearly bankrupted me,” Schwartz admitted. “Greta blubbered about how of course I didn’t remember…whoever she was. She said the best time manipulations leave no seams. Can you believe this broad? I had to get arrested for indecent exposure and diddle that disgusting Senator McCarthy just to get in the papers long enough to keep the club afloat. I will never forgive Greta if that ends up being my legacy.”
What Levy’s fellow dancers wanted to know was why. Why would she throw away an easy gig making good money to do some beatnik modern art experimental piece of garbage? “She was keeping weird company,” Scarlett said. “Hanging out in coffeehouses, that sort of thing. They must’ve got into her head. It’s a damn shame. She was a good girl, most of the time.”
Lady illusionists were not in high demand in the mid-1950s, as it turned out, and when Levy was fired, she immediately ran into money problems. She became a shut-in; she discovered whiskey. She was prone to blubbering to strangers on the street, asking if they had heard of some supposedly famous diary.
Then, out of the blue, Levy cleaned up, turning her life around on a dime. She even tried marriage in the early ’60s, with a plastics man. She lied about her age on their marriage license. When it became apparent that she was not twenty-three but nearly thirty, and not a toilet heiress but rather a destitute immigrant with a penchant for drink and depression and lying, he left her in the middle of the night, too embarrassed to go through the legal process of divorce and admit to having been duped so thoroughly. He instead drove himself to the Catskills in his ’39 Studebaker and shot himself in the chest. His family asked that his name not be printed.
Levy spent her later years performing in subway stations. Thanks to her husband’s inheritance, she didn’t need the money anymore, but she did need the audience. Sadly, one cannot choose one’s audience at the Second Avenue subway station at 4 a.m. According to police reports, a heckler had so enraged Greta that she heckled back—dangling a pack of birth control pills in front of his face, which she threatened to “send back in time to your poor suffering mother, so you’ll never be born.” He became so confused and enraged that he pushed her onto the tracks and into an oncoming F train. When police arrived, the man had disappeared, though no witnesses could recall what he looked like or when he had left the scene, or indeed if he had been there in the first place. The birth control pills, considered evidence, were also missing.
“I shouldn’t have lost my temper,” said Schwartz. “If I had just kept a lid on it, maybe she’d still be here. Still a big fat pain in my ass, but alive.”
A memorial service will be held at Va-Va-Voom Girls, reopened for one night only, $5 cover, well drinks $1 until 10 p.m.